The Place (and Place-ness) of Occupy, Ten Years On

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Before 2021 comes to a close, let's remember the many tributes, found in many year-end wrap-ups written just about exactly ten years ago (including one of my own), to the tens of thousands of people across our country, and the tens of millions of people around the world, who stood up in 2011, and fought for their local communities, and strove to reclaim their cultural strength against oppressive elites. I am, of course, talking about Occupy.

Obviously, not many people talked about Occupy--whether we mean Occupy Wall Street or any of its other many incarnations--that way, either at the time or since, whether they be those who were directly involved or those who merely cheered them or castigated them from the sidelines. With their their class-based talk of the "99%" challenging the "1%," and their attacks on everything from oppressive student loans to growing wage gaps to spiraling health care costs, it was easy to assume that Occupy--in the United States at least--reflected the complaints of underemployed college grads with progressive politics, and nothing more. True, some people recognized that its radicalism was broader, more cultural and communal, than that--Jedidiah Purdy, for one, argued that OWS provided conservative as well as liberal, socialist, and anarchic lessons for us all, one of which ("It is sometimes necessary and appropriate to appeal to...[the] sentimental ties that join individuals in group") I think sums up what happened in Zuccoti Park in New York City from September to November of 2011 as well as anything written about it since. What, after all, held together the people drawn to those protests, and inspired them to built those makeshift communities, more than the stories and testimonies which those suffering through the Great Recession stood up to share?

Most, however, look back upon the Occupy movement as a failure, a perhaps inevitable and in any case an embarrassing one. The essayist Freddie deBoer recently summed up the results of Occupy pithily, claiming that, given the apparent absence of attacks upon the power of capital in progressive circles today (I say "apparent" because deBoer--a wonderful writer but not, I think, at his best here--appears to base his judgment perhaps too much on that which he sees posted to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), one must conclude that OWS's failure is "almost complete." Even those deeply sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street's general aims--specifically, challenging the financial and social power of the 1%--see it as having been a "leaderless, ultimately structureless collection of people," unfortunately reflecting the tendency of those on the left to engage in "mindless repetition" and talk in circles in an "outwardly incomprehensible loop." Those inclined to rant about the undeniably jargony woke-speech of many of those concerned with social justice today can easily connect the dots.

But such connections would miss the real point of Occupy, I think, and the real reason its messy provocations and demands have nonetheless continued to reverberate and recur within American discourse, shaping the way many of us think about economic equality and its disruptive effects. That lesson is contained less in what the protesters said, much less how they said, and rather in what they did: they occupied. Meaning that their argument about the oppressive power over our lives, our family finances, our economic plans, and our communities' fiscal integrity which the 1% wields was literally grounded in a claim to a space. A public space, wherein human beings can and should be able to democratically, deliberately, determine the risks and rewards of their collective choices. An inhabited space, wherein those who make their homes and contribute to their cultures and simply live can act with the sort of freedom that not being subject to what Thomas Jefferson derisively called (in a recreation of a historically unsubstantiated but intellectually truthful dinner conversation) the "moneyed interest" and "New York stock-jobbers" allows. A space wherein one can insist that the laws of the market (especially as mastered by those whose wealth and advantages enable them to) are not, as Wendell Berry has insisted, "inevitable." To claim such a space, and to occupy it in the face of the (elitely developed) rules which claim that the people, gathered together, simply cannot, should not, must not, act or organize or vote in certain ways, is and has been central to the arguments against finance capitalism which millions concerned about preserving their places and their choices in this world have made ever since the Industrial Revolution, if not earlier.

The centrality of occupying a space was key to the 19th-century Populist movement, for example, though it was rarely articulated as such. After all, the whole point of organizing at community granges in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, Iowa, and Texas to challenge the power of the railroads was exactly because this alliance of farmers and ranchers and homesteaders wanted to defend the communities and the ways of life which had developed in those places, communities and ways of life that were being driven to ruin by manipulative railroad shipping rates and punitive lending and mortgage practices. They wanted their families and their children's families to be able endure in place, and they knew that collectively fighting on behalf of the integrity of their places, rather than giving in to an individualizing acceptance of the undemocratic, unaccountable, why-don't-you-just-sell-out-and-invest-in-stocks-instead-marketplace, was their only option. Such a fight would be inconceivable without a sense of place-ness. The better observers realized this parallel at the time, seeing in Occupy Wall Street in 2011 a model for a twenty-first-century, "open-source populism," with the places where we stand and build lives for ourselves being much more inclusive and interdependent than was the case in the 1890s or 1930s, but nonetheless playing the same conceptual role of pointing us towards that which we want to conserve in the face of the atomizing effects of concentrated capital. While the ideologies and trajectories followed by other instances of populist occupation--including everything from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle to the water protectors at Standing Rock to the Little Mountain Cohousing village in Vancouver to the Solidarity House Cooperative in Laramie--their commonalities remain: people inhabit places, and so fighting on behalf of the democratic treatment of people must, or at least should, incorporate a defense of a place, whether literal or metaphorical or both.

This is what Occupy Wall Street did: it made its rejection of financial rules visible and present in a particular location, and proceeded to speak and act and protest against all the ways in which economic oppression disrupts the freedom of people in their places by making that location into a human space--complete with publications and libraries and all sorts of other things which humans do. Still, the embodiment of a defense of the ability of people to freely build and securely maintain their neighborhoods, communities, and ways of life--in other words, their places--in the actual establishment of a place itself, however audacious and authentic and influential such an action may be, doesn't lend itself to specific, programmatic plans of political action, any more than the neighborhood or community which anyone reading this lives in itself manifests a ready-made set of talking points or calls for legislation. That's just not the way human spaces work. And so, of course, in terms of a direct legislative and organizational consequences, Occupy comes up short.

It was perhaps this utopian populist element of Occupy--the insistence that in these places, these people possess the sovereign power (or at least ought to) to determine for themselves how to live--that made it less than entirely admirable to some leftist and localists who either opposed it or thought it silly and inconsequential. For Michael Walzer, the long-time editor of Dissent and one of the most perceptive and respected voices on the American left, the Occupy movement was "heartening" but nonetheless primitive; the point of such movements, in his view, is to establish not a place but rather "a presence on the actual ground of democratic politics--where parties are organized and elections fought." The aim that is, according to him, is not to occupy any real or conceptual territory, but to win that territory over to one's side, which means specifically "to force a political party to adopt [one's] program." (The fact that Walzer was, at best, only grumpily tolerant of the enthusiasm which greeted Bernie Sanders's own Jeffersonian and populist form of democratic socialism is, perhaps, revealing here.) Obviously, there is much truth here. Walzer, like just about everyone else deeply committed to a point a view in our democratic society--whether it be anti-tax libertarianism or democratic socialism or Christian integralism--wants to see that view itself established as a matter of law and policy and culture, and not merely as a organizing premise for families or neighborhoods or churches to make use of. This is, of course, a desire complicated by the realities of federalism and the many different, subsidiarian ways in which identities are articulated and authority distributed in our country, to say nothing of others. But it is also complicated by Walzer's own deep belief in the necessity of starting with local, particular places.

Geoffrey Kurtz, a political theorist and scholar of Walzer's thought, has written essays which explore this dynamic indirectly. While never mentioning Occupy Wall Street or Walzer's comments upon it, Kurtz observes that Walzer's ideas have long exhibited, to a sometimes greater and sometimes lesser degree, a tension regarding the experience of belonging. He agrees with other scholars that Walzer's political philosophy is one which takes seriously the proposition that human beings construct and dwell within "moral worlds that contain the resources necessary for their improvement," meaning that visions of more egalitarian, more fair, more free and just arrangements of the power otherwise claimed by the economic elite should not be top-down, all-or-nothing impositions. Rather, Walzer's is a "decentralized democratic socialism," strongly opposed to the administrative state, and thus one which "conveys the possibility of a socialist politics that does not worship progress and innovation." But why then would Walzer not be an enthusiast for similar municipalist experiments around the world, for what his own journal labeled "experimental utopias," which OWS was clearly an early, and perhaps incoherent, but nonetheless fully intentional example of?

Kurtz provides no direct answer--but he does suggest that Walzer is perhaps dispositionally "uninterested in understanding the core of that which he wants to conserve." In an unpublished paper of his, Kurtz digs even deeper into Walzer's oeuvre, insightfully pointing out the ways in which Walzer, a secular Jew, nonetheless implicitly acknowledges that "the mutual recognition of persons depends on a mystery," one that Walzer himself is disinclined to explore or see fully committed to by any of the hypothetical socialist citizens he invokes, all while admitting that those mysteries of belief and identification and attachment "can be the moral basis for a political commitment in the sense that it orients and sustains those who recognize it." While this is admittedly a large interpretive leap, I think that Kurtz can help us understand why it is, then, that even some of those whose particular socialist politics ought to align them strongly with the sentimental and local and communal form which Occupy's protest against economic exploitation took, saw it nonetheless as an impressive yet fundamentally childish step, rather than a model to be embraced. To put it crudely, and probably a little unfairly, but perhaps nonetheless accurately: such thinkers probably aren't believers…while holding up a sign, sitting at a lunch counter, sticking a flower in a gun, setting up a tent, and occupying a space in the face state and corporate power is an act of utopian belief and faith. A belief, to go back to Berry's insight above, that something may not be--and should not be accepted as being--an economic, and therefore social, inevitability.

In reference to the aforementioned "experimental utopias," perhaps the best comparison with Walzer's--perhaps limited but still clearly wise--approach to conceiving of a more egalitarian politics is the arguments of Murray Bookchin. The contributions of Bookchin and Walzer (left and right in this photo) occupy very different corners of the radical democratic quadrant of American thought, despite many similarities--their concern for pluralism, their respect for communities, and their suspicion of efforts to take the struggle against capitalism out of the hands of ordinary people. Bookchin, who would have been 100 years old this year, was of a different generation and orientation than Walzer. Whereas the latter made his mark primarily in the post-Vietnam era of Ronald Reagan, fighting within the Democratic party for what the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, Michael Harrington, called "the left wing of the possible," the former's fights on behalf of what he came to call "social ecology" and "communalism" were fought outside of either of the dominant political parties in America, both of which were transforming throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as the individualist, environmentalist, and technological waves which washed away the statist, post-WWII New Deal consensus began to emerge. Fundamentally, though, the key difference may simply be that Walzer, in the wake of those waves, has long insisted that taking the energy they unleashed and using them to build political agendas and structures is the only radical politics worthy of the name. Anything other than that, however deeply felt and expressed, is mere play-acting.

That warning should never be entirely dismissed by those who believe another world is possible; as any reader of the Epistle of James can tell you, belief needs organization and structure to bring possibilities about. But that belief, that confidence in anarchic actions and democratic demands and communal alternatives, must come first. And moreover, as Doug Henwood observes in his own conflicted-yet-deeply-appreciative recollections of OWS, anarchic actions, properly understood, do (or at least can) have a structure to them, and need not be nearly so disconnected by constant discussion from concrete action as Occupy and other utopian experiments have stereotypically been seen to be. Bookchin's insights into how people can truly, freely--while still methodically!--make the places they occupy into transformative spaces is one that needs to be remembered by localists and radicals and everyone who cares about the common good today, 10 years on. As one activist put it, invoking Bookchin's faith in ecologically conscious communities which reject the supply chains of global capital, the legacy of Occupy Wall Street was "something that touches our deepest spiritual yearning," in a very un-Walzerian sense; "its practice says: 'We will no longer live in hatred and competition. We will live in love and community.'" In our deeply divided current moment, is there any better model to carry into our (hopefully) increasingly local-community-focused, (hopefully) increasingly egalitarian, (hopefully) increasingly small-d democratic future? I think not.

Regarding Mutualism, Cooperativism, and Other (Interstitially) Anti-Capitalist Alternatives

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

If future historians wish to find some silver lining in COVID-19, the rise in mutualism in response to the shut-downs and dislocations it made necessary may be a good candidate. Community gardens, neighborhood associations, right-to-repair networks, business co-ops, crowd-sourcing approaches to providing health care and jobs and basic financial support: all increased in number and reach over the past 15 months, sometimes greatly. Examples can be found everywhere, from major American metropolises to small Welsh towns. To be sure, the pandemic has not transformed the American economy into a 21st-century version of Spain's famed Mondragon (the worker cooperative founded by the Catholic priest José María Arizmendiarrietain in 1956 in accordance with the principle of solidarity, which has flourished and been much imitated ever since). Still, over the past year business advisory groups, scholars, and think tanks have more and more often embraced the local and the cooperative as crucial for charting a sustainable, post-pandemic path forward. Whether this burst of interest in mutualist economic alternatives will last remains to be seen--but at the very least, those who have long worked to build these alternatives ought to be feeling some gratification right now.

This shift hasn’t been solely the result of the pandemic, of course—more democratic and decentralized economic forms, and the arguments on behalf of such, have been achieving greater prominence for well over a decade now. This prominence has inspired some writers to look back, allowing those who have long been refining their communalist, mutualist, and cooperative alternatives a chance to make their case. Perhaps by studying these cases, and thereby adding to the foundation of this shift, we can strengthen it, or even encourage ourselves to get involved in these projects (or start our own!).  But if that strengthening is to happen, it will require, I think, a clear sense of what these alternatives are premised upon, and how those premises prevent them from falling into centralized, capitalist ruts.

But before premises, some particulars: what is meant by mutualism and cooperativism, and why should they be understood as standing distinct from the usual capitalist routines of our economy? The simplest answer is that any organization of economic activity that has woven egalitarian and communitarian practices into their daily operations—whether in terms of ownership, production, decision-making, pricing, wage scales, distribution, or anything else—is, to one degree or another, pursuing a path which gives place to something other than profit-maximization and consumer-individuation, and thus is departing from the ideal capitalist form. That doesn’t mean that profit and consumption never matter to communes or co-ops or credit unions or anything else crowd-sourced; the human desires and pressures that give rise to markets can’t ever, and shouldn’t ever, be ignored. And by the same token, it's not as though the capitalist form has ever existed anywhere solely as a pure ideal, without any concern for community or equality. The point to grasp is simply that mutualist economic alternatives emerge organically, democratically, as people confront the failures of the market and work out ways to change or improve or work around them. They are, by definition, works of compromise, though no less aspirational for all that.

Thus a “mutualist economic alternative” could be something as formal as a utopian commune, with people living and eating in the same buildings, satisfying their limited needs entirely through agrarian autarkic practices. Or it could be something as informal as a group of neighbors spread out over a few suburban blocks, who got to know each other through church or work or their kids' school, who all share a single lawnmower, rotated according to a vaguely defined schedule, with everyone filling it up with gas when they finish using it. The pandemic may not have provided us with many more of the former, but much evidence suggests that the past 15 months (or, for that matter, the past 13 years), we’ve been seeing more and more of the latter. (The economist Juliet Schor noted this slowly emerging transformation--which she called the shift towards "plenitude"--over a decade ago.)

The one thing this enormous range of local and collective actions have in common is that they are all, as the late Marxist scholar Erik Olin Wright thoughtfully labeled then, “interstitial.” Wright links together religious monasteries, labor unions, Amish farming villages, employee-owned businesses, mutual aid associations, and many more, presenting them as all part of the distinctly non-revolutionary project of “eroding” (not smashing--even the most convinced socialist probably knows that this is and must remain a historical dead end--but rather resisting and taming and dismantling and escaping) capitalism. “We can get on with the business of building a new world, not from the ashes of the old, but within the interstices of the old” (How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21^st Century [Verso, 2021], p. 63).

True, enlisting all co-ops, communes, credit unions and crowd-sourcing networks into a single “anti-capitalist” project is a harder sell for some than others. Consider two recent books, Nathan Schneider’s Everything for Everyone: The RadicalTradition That is Shaping the Next Economy and Sara Horowitz’s Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up. Both are excellent. They are also quite different, despite their shared, hopeful conviction that the “next economy” is going to be a more democratic, more social, more cooperative, and more mutual one, and despite essentially addressing a more or less identical range of alternative economic forms. Most importantly, though, they both show, in different ways, the difficulty, I think, of accepting the “project”-implications of what they describe.

Schneider’s book is the more comprehensive of the two. Published in 2018, Schneider explores the whole economic and social history of people forming cooperative associations to access markets, share information and resources, and strengthen their communities. The book is full of insightful observations, beginning with the dual inspiration of Elinor Ostrom’s important work on how communities manage “common-pool resources” (key point: borders and enforcement mechanisms are essential) and the Roman Catholic catechetical teaching of “the universal destination of goods” (which means, among other things, that “private property is an aberration, though under the conditions of fallen human society…a necessary arrangement”—pp. 20-21, 23-24). This mix of the practical and the moral is exactly what those thinking about communitarian alternatives need, and it shapes Schneider’s engagement with cooperative groups, businesses, and organizations both locally and internationally. In following examples from Kenya to Colorado, his awareness of the precariousness of communal alternatives—the way they require both “a supportive, nourishing culture from below and enabling policy from on high” (p. 14)—is a constant, and that’s valuable, encouraging stuff.

I wonder, though, about Schneider’s perspective on building cooperative alternatives to capitalism in today’s thoroughly globalized world. Given both his generation (he was born in the 1980s) and his vocation (he is a journalist and scholar of media studies), it is perhaps to be expected that Schneider would spend large part of his book discussing the (arguably entirely hypothetical) community-building potential of phone apps and crypto-currencies. While he is fully conscious of how “the lords of the cloud” will never allow the internet to become “an egalitarian commons of borderless, permissionless, peer-to-peer productivity,” he nonetheless appears ambivalent about attempts to reclaim the faded, real-world cooperative accomplishments (the grain elevators, the fisheries) of “sedentary peoples,” with he and his family instead being committed to “staying as nomadic as we can manage” (pp. 215-217). This is unfortunate, I think; it reflects a disengagement with place which leads Schneider to be more enamored of whatever he can designate as “half-socialist, half-libertarian”—really, anything that replaces government with “cooperative mechanisms” (pp. 185-188)—than perhaps he should be. The reality is that building sustainable alternatives must engage multiple levels of governance, taxation, and regulation—what he elsewhere wisely calls the “local, diverse, compromised legacies” of co-ops across the country and around the world—if they are going to have the social and economic power to maintain their ground. He is absolutely correct that “a generation gap divides the cooperative movement today” (pp. 232-233); it’s a gap that I think he recognizes his own place within, and one that I trust he will move out of, eventually.

Horowitz’s book similarly makes use of history to make an argument for cooperative alternatives that is both practical and moral, but the history she makes use of is intensely personal, something Schneider's writings could only invoke to a limited extent. Horowtiz’s frankly remarkable family history (her father was born in 1918, and worked closely his own father in building up union power for garment makers and others in pre-New Deal days) allows her a perspective on the possibilities for mutualism which is much needed in America today. Far from encompassing a wide range of communalist endeavors, Horowitz sees mutualism as most obviously something built by those looking to establish the conditions under which they work under industrial capitalism—in other words, through the building of unions. While her history makes use of Marx, Proudhon, Tocqueville, and many others, the heart of her historical argument never really strays far from the way Roosevelt’s New Deal, through legislation like the National Labor Relations Act, legitimated and empowered the associational efforts of people like her grandfather and father, only later to see that power taken away. As she somewhat rhapsodically describes those years:

[T]he success of Roosevelt’s top-down approach to social change via government programs created the sweeping national initiatives—the Civilian Conservation Corps, the orks Progress Administration, and so on—that we associate with the New Deal today….But I see another important element to the story. Roosevelt recognize the limits of what government could accomplish on its own….Rather than build new institutions from scratch, he looked at the ecosystem of mutualist organizations that already existed and realized that unions were the perfect tools to find workers where they already were….[The New Deal] would enshrine, protect, define, and bolster the labor movement, and in particular the strategy of industrial unionism. Whereas before…organized labor had been a diverse and idiosyncratic mutualist movement that was constantly experimenting….Roosevelt had in effect given unions a “job” in the post-New Deal economy. By putting a legal structure around the right to collectively bargain, Roosevelt had given unions a mandate--to bargain for higher wages--while also giving their economic model a regulatory backdrop….The New Deal created the business model that let unions thrive through the middle of the twentieth century (pp. 150-152).

Horowitz is not a labor historian, and there are many that might dispute the mutualist sympathies she sees embedded in that legislation. Still, her perspective--as the child and grandchild of labor organizers, she has an intimate understanding of the pre-political, associational, communal histories of diverse workers striving to carve out for themselves a place in late 19^th- and early 20^th-century industrial America--should be taken seriously. In fact her tale, and the way she extends it into such practical matters of raising capital and establishing revenue streams to support mutualist organizations, probably captures the point of Schneider’s observation about alternatives to capitalism requiring both a supportive culture below and enabling policy above better than any story he actually shared in his own book.

Like many others who succeed in building alternatives, though, Horowitz tends to see her particular alternative as a singular, necessary answer. A life-long contract worker, who founded the Freelancers Union and the Freelancers Insurance Company, she is quick to take decentralization to an extreme: “We live in a decentralized economy, and the next safety net will be no less decentralized” (p. 45). Her contempt for a Democratic party whose demographic base today is mostly disconnected from unionization and prefers national, redistributive solutions instead isn’t as great as her contempt for a Republican party which has consistently worked to undermine union power...but it is pretty great nonetheless. (Her story of how the FIC found itself discriminated against by President Obama's Affordable Care Act is one every reformer should read.) Her insistence that “[t]here’s no reason that proposals for nationalized health care can’t co-exist with mutualism, but mutualist organizations themselves—unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, faith communities—are uniquely position to be the delivery mechanism for that care” (p. 191) makes obvious sense…until one remembers that she is essentially describing Canadian Medicare with their Local Health Integration Networks, and now here come the (basically accurate, I would say) accusations of “socialism” again, which Horowitz insists--wrongly, I have to say--“couldn’t be more different” from her mutualist approach (p. 49). It would be interesting to know if Horowitz imagines a mutualist potential embedded in President Biden's American Rescue Plan Act, and if she doesn't, where exactly she thinks difference between Biden's ambitious and Roosevelt's actually lay.

These kinds of arguments--which really come down to what kind of "project" one is willing or unwilling to see one's alternative aspirations to encompass--all turn on the degree to which one understands these efforts in terms of people as opposed to ideas, and it is here where a return to Mondragon is helpful. Both Schneider and Horowitz dedicate part of their book to the aforementioned Mondragon Corporation, and it is worth considering its example as an important complement--and perhaps correction--to some of their insights. Father Arizmendiarrieta, universally known as “Arizmendi,” arrived in the Mondragon Valley of the Basque region of Spain in 1941 and began to teach, with an emphasis on vocational skills and cooperative techniques, with the aim of building up the collective wealth and the sense of solidarity within his community. When he established, along with five graduates of the school he’d established, the first Mondragon co-op, manufacturing paraffin burners, his goal was--and remains for the next 20 years, until his death in 1976--to change lives by changing, cooperatively and mutually, the economic conditions within which those lives were lived. "The interesting and key thing," he wrote, "is not the cooperatives, but the cooperators. Likewise, it is not democracy, but democrats. Not so much ideas as life experiences."

Since his death, Mondragon has expanded internationally, moving into multiple areas of manufacturing, retail, and finance, with its mutualist and cooperative principles mostly holding firm. For example, to enable to genuine mutual feeling between workers and managers, wage differences are tightly controlled, with the democratically chosen directors of different Mondragon cooperatives earning wages no greater than 9 times that of the lowest-paid worker in the firm, with the usual difference being held to 5-1. Unsurprising, many socialist thinker—including Wright—have seen this successful commercial venture, the seventh wealthiest company in Spain in terms of assets, as a vital anti-capitalist model for others as well.

Whether it is or not will be argued about for as long as the terms themselves are debated. But whatever its correct description, it is unfortunate that Arizmendi’s collected Reflections—the which are only now finally being made available in English thanks to a translation project spear-headed by Solidarity Hall—weren’t available to either of the authors discussed here, or so many others who strive to hold build communalist or mutualist or cooperative economic alternatives. (Though Schneider provides a forward to the Solidarity Hall publication.) Arizmendi and those who followed him have negotiated, experimented, tapped local resources, lobbied national parties, and appealed to international bodies; they have, in short, truly lived out Arizmendi’s profoundly pluralistic vision of cooperative empowerment. In the end, if the goal is worker empowerment, community solidarity, and Christian love, then focus first on the person, and who cares what ideological category such a personalist focus falls under? The radical possibilities of disparate alternatives which emerge over time and experimentation must not be disregarded just because they seem to challenge accepted patterns of economic behavior, whether left or right:

Our cooperatives must primarily serve those who wish them to be bulwarks of social justice, and not those who see cooperatives as refuges or safe spaces for their conservative inclinations….We cooperators have in our minds the idea that the future society will probably have to be pluralist in all aspects, including economics: the state and the private sector, the market and the planned economy, various entities, be they paternalistic, capitalist, or socialist, will be combined and coordinated. If we really believe in and love people, their freedom, justice and democracy, we will need to treat each situation, the nature of each activity, the level of evolution and development of each community, on the basis of an approach that is overarching but not exclusive (Arizmendi, Reflections, p. 100).

Popular discourse in the United States today—as well as in many places around the world—hasn’t been so open to alternatives to the liberal capitalist mainstream for close to a century. Partly this is a result of the economic catastrophes of recent years: the beginnings of the Great Recession 13 years ago, and of course the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic, beginning last spring. But it is also the result of political leaders who have been willing to forthrightly identify themselves with different forms and degrees of anti-capitalism, and even more so it is the result thousands of people--both those who have labored, locally and collectively, over decades to hold on to and to share the resources their communities and vocations and places have brought to them, as well as those who are attempting, for reasons of both curiosity and desperation, to rediscover these mutualist, communalist, and cooperativist possibilities today. Being clear on the levels involved in building and recovering such practices, and being willing to embrace their sometimes discomforting ideological plurality and breadth, will be essential for anyone who hopes, in the neighborhoods and churches and communities, to do their part. Schneider’s and Horowitz’s books provide some excellent perspective and guidance, and I strongly recommend them. But I also recommend contacting and learning from those who are doing this collective, cooperative work, whatever they may call it, wherever they may be. Whatever such hands-on learning involves and whatever ways it is described, Arizmendi would be proud.

What Hath Bernie (Ideologically) Wrought?

[The online magazine Current asked me to write something about Bernie Sanders, so I did. This is a slightly longer, slightly different, and more personal version of that essay. Consider it my benediction on the first genuine passion for a presidential candidate I have ever experienced as a voting, adult citizen--that is, a benediction on my own weirdly populist/localist/communitarian take on the Bern.]

With President Biden strongly pushing for trillions of dollars in covid relief, infrastructure building, education funding, health care support, and more, the support his progressive agenda has enjoyed both among his fellow Democrats and in national polls has been seen by many as at least partly the result of Senator Bernie Sanders’s transformative runs for the presidency. The argument is that Biden, because of his reputation as pragmatic centrist and a reliable member of the Democratic party establishment, can move forward with essentially the same rather radical (and mostly quite popular!) agenda which Sanders developed in a way that Sanders himself, with his proud “democratic socialist” self-identification and his independent (though inconsistent) refusal to ever formally join the Democratic party, never could have. As The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch put it, repurposing the old saw about how President Nixon’s anti-communism made it politically possible for him to open up diplomatic relations with communist China, “Only Biden Can Go to Norway.” 

For those who view ideologies as tools, with moral principles and social theories packaged together solely for the purpose of advancing political policies, this is fine. In fact, they might even say it’s the best possible result: radical ideas becoming sufficiently normalized that someone without any attachment to the socialistic ideology through which they were articulated (which certainly describes Biden) can advance them under a different label entirely! Arguably, that's the story of all radicalism movements in American history. But for those whose commitment to their ideological preferences is great enough for them to persevere through opposition and actually shape those ideas in the first place--and obviously, for anyone who has read the stuff I write more than just once over the years, this is where I would intellectually situate myself--this kind of result may generate ambivalence.

Sanders himself is not at all ambivalent about Biden’s efforts thus far: he fully supports them and hopes to build upon them further. Among the aforementioned true believers though, or at least a few of them, this complicates Sanders’s relationship to the ideological package which he has trumpeted more successfully than any other American politician since Eugene V. Debs a century ago. If Sanders’s “democratic socialism” is the sort of thing which he can endorse as being effectively, if not entirely, advanced by an American president with no interest in socialist analysis and no intention of thoroughly democratizing wealth in America, then just what was the ideological distinction of his socialist claims in the first place?

The responses to this question range from those on the left who insist Sanders was never a true socialist anyway (and thus is a distraction), to those on the right who are delighted to paint Biden’s progressive liberalism with the same socialist accusation they’ve employed against Democrats for close to a century (and thus should be denounced). In the midst of these responses, though, there is the fact that over the years of Sanders’s presidential campaigns there have been significant increases in the number of Americans who sympathize with socialist goals, and an increase in the number of arenas—both local and national, both strictly economic and broadly cultural—within which this sympathy has been expressed. The growth of the Democratic Socialists of America—a “multi-tendency organization” with significant differences between its hundreds of chapters, an organization which has prominently benefited from Sanders’s campaigns, despite his never having joined it—is perhaps the most emblematic example, but it isn’t the only one. (As a long-time member of the DSA, my opinions here are obviously less than neutral!)

Those who insist upon a definition of socialism which preserves the historical materialism of Karl Marx—that is, that socialism must involve a collectivization of the economy, one achieved through the actions of the working class (making use of captured state power, at least under most construals of Marxism)—the lack of ideological rigor in these various calls for “equity” or “fairness” or “justice” may be annoying, to say the least. As part of a long, thoughtful essay, full of genuine (if often back-handed) praise of the Democratic Socialists of America, author Frederik deBoer expressed doubt that “the average DSA member could give you a coherent definition of what ‘democratic socialism’ even is,” but also reflected that while the those who identity with socialist causes today haven’t accomplished much on their own terms, “neither has Black Lives Matter, or MeToo, or any group (or individual) which has participated in this confused and substance-free ‘social revolution’ we are supposedly living in.” This is, to be sure, a rather cynical take on political developments of the past half-decade—yet it also touches on something vital, which makes deBoer's insight relevant. Specifically, it points us toward the question of how seriously we should take the likely connection between Sanders’s radical insistence (given the realities of American politics) upon the validity of “democratic socialism,” whatever its ideological inconsistencies, and the broad emergence of groups and causes which, in their own sometimes anarchic ways, similarly embraced a democratizing aim. (Yes, it's easy to point, as counter-evidence, to conflicts between Sanders and Black Lives Matter protesters on the campaign trail, or the serious limits in African-American support for his candidacy, or the declarations of right-wing pundits that Sanders's radicalism had nothing to do with--or at least has "lost control of"--the anti-establishment energy of 2020. But all that is marginal, I think, when compared to the indisputable connection which BLM and other radical leaders and thinkers and activist organizations posited between what Sanders represented and was trying to do, and what they want to see happen.)

The scientific socialism of Marx presented the alienating effects of concentrated socio-economic power as something that could only be smashed through revolutionary action. Later thinkers saw that this revolutionary logic did not reflect the actual socio-economic developments of the industrial world, and argued that socialism could be build electorally in the midst of the marketplace—which is what gave us “democratic socialism” (and later “social democracy,” such as is well represented by countries like Norway, and by the Sanders—and arguably the current Biden!—platform).

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright, however, suggested that socialists should see the obstacles to the democratization of wealth as something that can be “eroded” as well as smashed or tamed. How? By building and advocating for alternatives “interstitially.” Wright acknowledged that focusing on the many different ways in which social goods can be produced and distributed besides the capitalist marketplace—including “within the intimate relations of families; through community-based networks and organizations; by cooperatives owned and governed democratically by their members; though nonprofit market-oriented organizations; through peer-to-peer networks engaged in collaborative production processes,” etc.—would not be sufficient to accomplish the aims of socialism; instead “we need a way of linking the bottom-up, society-centered strategic vision of anarchism with the top-down, state-centered strategic logic of social democracy.” Nonetheless, the relationship between the two are vital; writing in an article in Jacobin published before his death, he argued that it is through such open-ended and organic associational efforts that we can “get on with the business of building a new world—not from the ashes of the old, but within the interstices of the old.”

The democratic socialist banner which Sanders has long inspired people with is obviously far more on the social democratic side than the anarchic one. And yet, it would also be simply perverse to claim that Sanders’s constant emphasis on income inequality and worker disempowerment had no relevance whatsoever to the explosion of interest of late in diverse radical movements for recognition and justice, or—especially during the pandemic—cooperative efforts to provide mutual aid. Whether obvious or not, that relevance, it seems to me, always eventually emerges. Michael Harrington, the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, towards the end of a decades-long engagement with socialist debates, concluded in his final book that socialism had to move towards a “decentralized conception of its goal”—going so far as to ask if a “socialist republicanism” was possible (Socialism: Past and Future, p. 277). (And if an organizer like Harrington doesn't persuade you, maybe the late in life discovery of decentralization by the Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen can.) Perhaps looking back historically over the Sanders’s ideological impact on the 2010s will similarly oblige us to recognize that his greatest accomplishment wasn’t in serving as the fulcrum by which the mainstream of the Democratic party was made comfortable with certain (re-named!) democratic socialist ideas, but as having helped bring into the mainstream a fruitful, disparate mess of radicalisms, all of which are busy promoting their own alternative democratizing visions.

In his essay “Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War,” a detailed but also touching retrospective on what Sanders meant for many of those of us on the left, Matt Karp observed: “If Bernie Sanders was not fated to be the Abraham Lincoln of the twenty-first-century left, winning a political revolution under his own banner, he may well be something like our John Quincy Adams—the ‘Old Man Eloquent’ whose passionate broadsides against the Slave Power in the 1830s and 1840s inspired the radicals who toppled it a generation later.” This is, I think, is correct. I firmly supported Sanders, but probably more because I could see in his campaigns an ideological richness, a genuine multiplicity of possibilities--both  egalitarian and localist as well as even conservative or Christian--that extended far beyond the neoliberal homo economicus which remains too often our default today, than because I wanted him to win. That is, I wanted his ideas to win, and that means for his ideological construct to expand and multiply and flourish. To see ideological constructs such as that which Sanders long employed (and still does!) as static and linear is to perhaps misunderstand the organic character of ideological constructs in general. Yes, Bernie Sanders failed to win the presidency--but still, he didn’t fail to fertilize, with his words and actions, long moribund ideas in America. The diverse, disparate ideological growths in his wake will likely be with us for a while yet. Or so I hope, anyway.

What Urban Liberals Might Learn From Rural Rebels

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Loka Ashwood, a rural sociologist at Auburn University, visited The Land Institute in Salina, KS, last September, and gave a presentation on her then just-published book, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America. The book is wonderful, if sometimes a little frustrating--I'd love everyone to read it, but especially the liberal editors of Washington Monthly, the liberal contributors to Boston Review, and all the progressive liberals surrounding Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign. Why them, in particular? Well, that takes some explaining.

I pick on the Monthly and the Review in particular because they both recently published extensive packages of articles addressing--in thoughtful and (mostly) non-condescending ways--the fate of liberal politics and left causes in general in rural parts of America, and insisting that a new engagement by those on the left with rural America is a necessity. Paul Glastris, the editor of the Monthly, announced the issue's focus by calling upon its mostly wonky, mostly DC-living readership to "check your coastal urban privilege," and the articles which followed thoughtfully examined how agricultural consolidation is more a problem for rural communities today than tariffs, and how airline deregulation and the weakening of antitrust laws have created huge difficulties for small and mid-size cities in rural parts of the country trying to hold onto the resources upon which rural, regional economies depend. Elizabeth Catte, editing a special issue titled "Left Elsewhere" for the Review, invoked the left-wing, populist history of miners unions and other 19th-century and early 20th-century fights in Appalachia, noted the parallels between those movements and the West Virginia teachers strike, and insisted that liberal reformers today need to rediscover a "continuity" with rural activists from the past. And as for Warren, just on Wednesday her campaign dropped a long list of policy proposals she is promising to pursue if elected president, any one of which--supporting farmers in their pleas for much needed right-to-repair laws, shifting anti-trust policy to focus as least much on the Monsanto-manipulated agricultural producer as on the cheap-food-price-paying consumer--would be valuable additions in the fight to preserve rural economies and keep agricultural communities intact.

Talk is cheap, of course. Still, these and many other responses--some hopeful, some less so--from the liberal/progressive/socialist/left side of the political aisle in American life would seem to suggest, if nothing else, that in the wake of consistent major losses in the middle of the country over the past couple of decades, at least some smart Democratic activists, think-tankers, and politicians want to be more serious about incorporating the social and economic concerns of rural America into their thinking. More power to them!

But, also, they should read Ashwood's book. Because her analysis of the way the federal, state, and county governments of Burke County, Georgia, plus the massive and entwined corporations of Southern Company and Alabama Power, and the nuclear Vogtle Electric Generating Plant which they all together managed to build on land that, at one time, was owned by and provided both cultural and natural support to the people who lived upon it, teaches sobering lessons to those who hope that policies alone, absent a deeper restructuring of how we think about rural communities, will suffice.

It should emphasize that I have no doubt that Ashwood herself would be sympathetic to all of those above mentioned policies, and probably many more. Her contempt for the crony capitalism and the regulatory state which uses eminent domain to serve the interests of for-profit bodies which perpetuate such capitalist concentrations of power is made exceptionally clear throughout the book and her other writings, so clear that I'm certain she would consider any program, no matter how minimal, which might even just slightly limit the ability of corporations (and the governments which enable them) to control whether or not farmers can fix their own equipment, or make use of their seeds, or hunt on what was, sometimes for generations, their own land, absolutely worth pursuing. Years of research in rural communities have convinced her--and she makes a convincing case--that the greatest enemy of rural America is what she calls "for-profit democracy." It's a term which she defines multiple times, often somewhat differently (readers of her book should be forewarned that she repeatedly introduces concepts, even if quite similar to a previously introduced one, with a "this is what I'm calling" declaration--it's a slightly distracting habit, but not a terrible one). It describes a phenomenon which should be familiar to anyone with a rural background, in which public utilities--which are nearly always for-profit corporations--work through the power of governments to capture resources (land, waterways, roads, and more) so as to expand their productive footprint (and, thus, their "public service," though of course also their profit margins). It's a phenomenon which ties together concerns over majoritarianism (urban areas with large populations rarely think about the rural consequences of voting in support of constructing electrical grids, power lines, water treatment plants, or waste repositories, and therefore for the invasive industrial expansions necessary to do so), monopolization (economies of scale, when dealing with the demand for equal access to comprehensive goods, invariably benefits those large economic actors which can provide said goods, and thus empowers their demands for special privileges from the state), and limited liability (the creation of corporate forms which can offload costs creates a corrupt condition of mutual dependency, as well as mutual enrichment, between government and private actors). To try to capture the complexity of her idea, consider this explanation:

[F]or-profit democracy is enacted through the collective legal form of the corporation. In no universe would corporations exist without a legal system committed to economic development. Corporations enjoy liability protections not afforded to humans that go by their own name. When the Smith family can't pay their mortgage, they lose their house. But if a nuclear power plant defaults on a loan payment or experiences a core meltdown, layers of subsidiary corporations, limited liability, and special legislation protect shareholders from paying their debts. Further, private utilities have an absolute monopoly because the state (in addition to making them legally possible) allows them to buy up one another while also demanding that citizens fund them....

If corporate expansion over public purposes and private profit stopped there, profit-seeking corporations might not be such a substantial affront to the moral economy of democracy. Perhaps the legal creation of what I see as "for-profit democracy"...could stay in a sphere of corporate trade and not over-power the right to own property for other reasons. Perhaps limited liability could apply only when corporations squared up against other corporations, without dispossessing humans, who still bore liability for their own actions. But corporate owners have not stopped there. On top of awarding them public and profit rights, the judiciary recognizes corporations as people....Economic development and making money are so confused with the ultimate ends of society that fictitious legal creations are treated as everyday people....Deft lawyers cleverly press the extension of human rights to the corporate form through narrow legal jurisprudence, making profit's rule ever more pervasive in ever more corners of democratic and everyday life. Meanwhile, the scales of justice that favor corporations bring democracy ever closer to the breaking point--a breaking point for the moral economy familiar to Sydney, Sara, Dave, Dean, Beau, and Patty [all of whom are various individuals that Ashwood profiles at length, all residents of Burke County who have found so many options for the traditional use of the resources and land once available to them circumscribed by the actions of power companies and the county government that are tempted to do as many others--just take the money and leave], who find themselves unable to compromise on their most deeply held principles for the sake of a profit-seeking legal apparatus (pp. 25, 71, 73).

There are many more arguments which Ashwood develops from her years-long, sometimes difficult engagement with and study of both the facts on the ground and the people who live upon it, there in Burke County. (In a nice moment, Ashwood relates how some doors were opened to her that might have remained closed as the word spread through this rural area that her husband was Irish, making her more sympathetic; apparently, stories of the sufferings of the Irish are still known among the distant descendants of the Scots-Irish in the Georgia backwoods still today.) Not all these arguments--about positive and negative freedom, about Thomas Hobbes, about the nature of private property itself--are equally well-informed. But the way she charts how the contracting of resources worsened racial divides, how the rhetoric of both Christian preaching and gun ownership was locally shaped by corporate-driven instability, and more was all superb. True, what she is studying may not be all that different from what happens in urban environments, when business interests get government support (and sometimes even subsidies!) to buy up and "improve" properties that were, in however limited a fashion, "commons" that contributed to urban life. But the fact that her context for examining the way these tensions play out is a rural one matters.

The problem, to put it simply, is rural conservatism. The people she spoke to--the white ones, anyway--nearly always voted Republican (when they bothered to vote, that is). How seriously, you might wonder, are we to take the observations and conclusions of someone who spent years tramping around the forests of eastern Georgia, and develops from that study a condemnation of corporate power and the rule of capital, a condemnation that, at least insofar as electoral results go, is apparently shared by essentially none of the white people she spoke to? Isn't it more likely that her fine-grained sociological study of the people of Burke County only reflects class and race-specific patterns of belief which we're all already familiar with, patterns that the well-intentioned proposals from Washington Monthly or Boston Review or Senator Warren fit into nicely? I would argue no: instead, Ashwood has revealed something important and not-often noticed. But unfortunately, you have to go beyond her fine book to see what that is.

Last year, Ashwood published--along with her book--a fascinating, somewhat rambling piece of sociological theory, one which attempts to categorize the type of anarchism that she had experienced so much of during her years in Georgia. It's difficult to reduce the multiple prongs of her argument in that essay to a single thesis, but this one might work: according to Ashwood, many rural people hold to an ideal of statelessness, of entirely independent self-governance. As this is an ideal with no practical vehicle of ideological expression in American politics today, it is instead often articulated in association with various parties, movements, and positions that, while not truly anarchic, nonetheless capture elements of the stateless ideal through rhetorically attacking the state--an "anti-state" position that comes in both "retract" (libertarian) and "reform" (progressive) versions. In her view, reformers "temporarily advocate a pro-statist view as a just means to a stateless end," while retractors "seek to reduce the power of the state without attention to intermediate issues of justice." Here is how she breaks it down:





Assuming we accept this typology (and I'm not sure I do, at least not entirely; I would like to have a long conversation with her as to why she assumes that radicalism is invariably tied to state power) what does it tell us about rural conservatism? Mainly, in Ashwood's view, that what many of the people she interviewed--people who struggled with the reality that tremendous (though definitely not equally shared) economic and technological benefits to their communities came entwined with alienating, land-grabbing, disempowering public-private partnerships--felt was an anarchic desire, one which came out sounding like conservatism, because there was no other available political language which came close to attaching to it. Their actions and reactions, in her view, clearly exhibited a conviction of and in something which their political context gave them no partisan formulation of.

On my reading, the real heart of For-Profit Democracy comes in her long chapter on "The Rural Rebel," which in her presentation is embodied by one William Gresham. William is a character, admired but not always appreciated by the other rural folk that Ashwood got to know, a former worker at the Savannah River Site--a 300-square mile "nuclear reservation" run by the Department of Energy which decades ago was a primary site for refining nuclear material, which stands directly across the Savannah river from the Vogtle nuclear plant--and now a general handyman and something of local legend, spoken of with admiration and sometimes disbelief. It takes a long time for Ashwood to gain his trust, but in time she spends many days with him as he runs errands, assists neighbors, fixes equipment, relates local history, and--eventually--takes her boating on the Savannah, crossing into areas which government signs declare off-limits, and to his hunting lodge, where he goes after squirrels and wild turkeys on property where being caught would mean time in jail. His knowledge of place in the Wendell Berry sense, particularly Sugar Creek, a tributary of the Savannah, is immense, and his awareness of the ecological devastation--in terms of erosion, water radiation, and more--of the land that he loves is highly detailed. He is contemptuous of local farmers who make use of the Conservation Reserve Program to supplement their incomes, and holds as an article of faith that everyone who takes a government job is physically lazy. Drawing on the work of Eric Hobsbawm, Ashwood describes what Gresham represented as thus:

William took issue with the power given to authorities, who then turned their authority into power over the people, rather than power for. He said that he didn't care about voting. That served to reinforce the state that had sucked so many of his neighbors dry. What does William stand against? For-profit politics. He stands against conjoined corporate and state corruption that violates his ideal of hard, honest work, embedded in everyday, manual, resource-intensive labor....

In the modern world, William finds the defenseless to be not only human, but also those voiceless life-forms in need of defense. The woods, open fields, lakes and streams, and inhabitants--quail, snakes, waters, trees--conjoin with disenfranchised humans to constitute what William sees as the defenseless rural poor....The term "environmentalist," signifying someone explicitly engaged in green politics as part of formal governance, doesn't fit. William clarified to me that he "ain't no tree hugger." The rural rebel defends what I sense to be "environmental honor," a poignant protection of what is seen as a defenseless community of ecology....

The bending of William's back in his self-chosen toil serves as as essential piece of his resistance against corporate and government control. He is not part of a roaming group of outlaws. Nor is he a member of a mob. He is in fact rare, and has the admiration of a following the stubbornly stands against the money interests that he sees destroying his homeland....Part of being a rebel can be staying at home--that in itself is an act of defiance against the state, which demands urban migration (pp. 126, 132, 134-135). 

There is clearly at least a touch of hero-worship in Ashwood's description of Gresham, but something powerfully authentic as well. Elements of social welfare can be found in his language, and traditional Christian morality as well, but no fondness, at least in Ashwood's telling, for either profit or progress, both of which, in Gresham's telling, invariably involve one in the machinations of both Big Business and Big Government. Gresham is hardly a role model for the more egalitarian and pluralistic world which sets the terms by which our economic and legal structures operate; Gresham's life operates in accordance with rules that are very particular to his gender (Greshman's friends are astonished that he brought a woman on one of his secret trips up the Savannah, and the aggressive flirtation Ashwood put up with while getting to know him bordered on the abusive) and his race (Ashwood's interviews make it clear that poor African-Americans that live near Gresham would never trespass property while hunting the way he does casually, or at least would never admit to doing so to an outsider like herself--the threat of law enforcement was real to them in the way it wasn't for Gresham). But for all that, is there anything "conservative," in the rural anarchic sense which Ashwood observed, that all the progressives, liberals, socialists, and others who are concerned about crony capitalism, alienation, monopolization, state oppression, and all the rest, can learn from? Well, maybe.

I have an acquaintance here in Wichita, KS, named Zack. (This is him posing next to Carrie Nation in downtown Wichita. He's the one on the left.) He's a good guy, a marathon-runner and a supporter of public radio. We go the rounds every once in a while, because his attitude towards politics is almost perfectly calibrated to make someone like myself, who teaches it for a living, kind of furious. But nonetheless I appreciate the way he, and other radicals (though by Ashwood's typology they're better described as "rebels") I have known, have pushed me to understand the many ways in which working through the institutional forms of society to achieve more moral, or more just, or more fair outcomes, cannot help but tie those outcomes to the power of the social institutions themselves. And democracy--at least representative democracy, the voting for candidates and the deliverance of sovereign authority on the basis of the results of those votes--provides no protection against this. Nor, arguably, is protest, at least not of the petition-gathering variety. In rethinking anarchism in the rural context which Ashwood provides, I see the possibility that the rhetoric of majoritarian democracy can co-opt protest, making it into something aligned with the goal of obtaining control over the state, as opposed to the goal of assuring spaces for collective action. And if the state is itself co-opted by (or at least entwined with) corporate entities hunting for profit--whether that be through contracting out to corporations the running of a nuclear power plant, or through making deals with developers to remake a city park in line with their physical preferences--then the whole logic of protest (to say nothing of voting) is changed, since it cannot present itself as doing anything other that replacing the management of the relationships with capital within the state. Perhaps some kind of socialist revolution could do the trick--but given that the historical record suggests pretty clearly the harms of that approach, what does that leave us with? Maybe just...individual acts of rebellion. As Ashwood concludes:

Taking the for-profit democratic state at face value prompts an understanding of rebels as something other than apolitical, pre-political, misguided malcontents. If the state is seem as complicit in the creation and persistence of the coal industry, the nuclear industry, or any other corporate industry that could not exist without the government, rebellion becomes less an unfortunate barrier to successful political action. It rather takes on its own legitimate basis of political reason by working entirely outside a state that sanctions exploitation (p. 125).

In the end, I'm not certain I take the "for-profit state" entirely at face value. I'm not certain that I agree that  private-public partnerships, absent a wholesale reconstruction of how markets function, are necessarily always disempowering and exploitive, especially if the public goods being secured (as, in theory, is the case with public utilities) are truly comprehensive. And therefore, relatedly, I'm not convinced that there's something wrong with Democrats who, in thinking about rural communities, focus on judicial decisions, state-enforced laws, and more. But even there isn't anything wrong, there well may be something missing. What's missing, perhaps, is a clearer understanding of the "why" any policies such of those would be valuable, assuming they can pull of their reforming work. It's not, at least insofar as Ashwood's work suggests, because farmers will be grateful for the security the state is providing. It's because, maybe, just maybe, it will help them be less in need of such outside security, and more able to live their arguably "rebellious" lives in their places. Which is exactly why all of them haven't decided to accept discipline, get with the program, and move to the city yet, right?

Three Takes On Anarchism

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

I've developed some relatively new intellectual interests over the past year. The most important--at least in terms of its likely long-term impact on the research work I'm doing--is an increased engagement with urban communities, and how questions about governance play out differently depending on the scale of the community in question, with particular relevance to urban entities that seem to fall in between our usually unexamined models of what constitutes a "big city"and a "small town." The other major development at first appears to have only a tangential relationship to the first one--but as I've dived into the literature and tried to give the subject more thought, I wonder if the connection between the two might not actually be quite important. The literature I'm talking about is anarchism, which has become increasingly fascinating to me.

My fascination isn't, as I said, entirely new; I've been thinking about how anarchist ideas can be an important contributor to left-leaning politics at least ever since I was exposed to the arguments for "interstitialism" in the work of Erik Olin Wright, and obviously the Occupy Movement from two years ago was a big part of my interest as well. But my realization--through both broad political events and things my students are teaching me close to home--that I need to wrestle more productively with the libertarian position (which, popularly anyway, overlaps with the anarchist in so many ways) was part of it as well. In any case, while I've been working on and off on anarchist ideas for a while now, it's been this year that I really dove into the scholarship and literature...and am learning, slowly, how it is that anarchist insights will have to be, I think a major element in any construction of alternative forms of governance.

Anarchism and governance? Yes, they can go together--because what an-archy calls for is an absence of, or a rejection of, an imposed and uniform ruling order, not, or at least not necessarily (or so I would insist, anyway), a mutually realized organic and adaptable one. Those who find it easy and reasonable to appropriate anarchist insights for libertarian ends--that is, ends which revolve around the fundamental premise that the individual, thanks to her rights, should stand independent from any non-chosen order--might find this insistence of mine a matter of sneaking some kind of socialist or communitarian concern through the mutualist backdoor, and therefore not really "anarchist" at all. From that perspective it would be, at best, a utopian claim for "government without government", at worst just another re-introduction of the possibility of tyranny. But what I'm working towards is the argument--not an original one, to be sure, but still, one that needs to be made and re-made regularly--that the "governance" of individuals (which I continue to believe is a social, civic, and egalitarian necessity) does not have to, or doesn't necessarily always have to, involve "government" insofar as social contractarian, constitutional, or state-based models are concerned. And if I want to understand what theoretical and practical options are available for thinking about living arrangements which do not really fit either our well-worn big-city bureaucratic or small-town democratic tropes, getting away from "government," and thinking differently about how community order arises may well be a big asset.

I read three anarchist works this year which really stood out. Only one of them--Scott's--approached anarchism in a manner which could be easily related to the issues I've just mentioned. Graeber's looked at anarchism entirely as a revolutionary method, a praxis which only required occasional theoretical consideration, and Adams's--a truly great book--wasn't formally about anarchism at all, but rather told his own life story in an elliptical way that reveals, almost as an afterthought, a kind of anarchic sensibility as the key to understanding his own (and, perhaps, everyone else's as well) "education." Still, I learned something from all of them, so let me say something about each, in reverse alphabetical order.

I meant to read James C. Scott's Two Cheers for Anarchism soon after it came out--but the paper I was working on at the time ended up making much more use of Scott's earlier anthropological and sociological studies, Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed. Those are detailed, exactly books, working out the basic foundations for the position that Scott takes in this text more broadly: specifically, a "process-oriented view" which celebrates cooperation against "hierarchy and state rule," and "involves a defense of politics, conflict, and debate, and the perpetual uncertainty and learning they entail" (pp. xii-xiii). That might sound like a robust defense of particular non-hierarchical democratic arrangements, but in fact the six somewhat disconnected essays which Scott included in this book range over a host of personal as well as political matters, and take a distinctly academic and agrarian tone. He makes it clear early on that his anarchism is non-doctrinaire: he is not opposed to the state, just realistic--on the basis of his study of early human history, he concludes that "of the roughly five-thousand-year history of states, only in the past two centuries of so has even the possibility arisen that states might occasionally enlarge the realm of human freedom" (p. xiv). With that conviction to guide him, he develops an argument for "vernacular" rather than statist approaches to social problems, characterized by searching and insubordinate  strategies where the proper response to collective difficulties is more a matter of happenstance and "charisma" than some principled (and thus available for hierarchical and homogenizing implementation) solution. Roving over a variety of disparate contexts, he highlights the importance of adaptability, and how the greatest pathology of institutionalized systems of measurement, scholarship, or just living is the systematic way in which it undermines such mutual--and, he thinks, ultimately egalitarian--adaptation.

What kind of economic or social context is necessary to keep alive adaptivity? Interestingly, Scott argues it is, most likely, "petty bourgeois" one:

[S]ince the Industrial Revolution and headlong urbanization, a vastly increasing share of the population has become propertyless and dependent on large, hierarchical organizations for their livelihood. The household economy of the small farmer-peasant or shopkeeper may have been just as poverty-stricken and insecure as that of the proletarian. it was, however, decidedly less subject to the quotidian, direct discipline of managers, bosses, and foremen. Even the tenant farmer, subject to the caprice of his landlord, or the small-holder, deeply in debt to the bank or moneylenders, was in control of his working day: when to plant, how to cultivate, when to harvest and sell, and so forth. Compare this to the factory worker tied to the clock from 8am to 5pm, tied to the rhythm of the machine, and closely monitored personally or electronically. Even in the service industries the pace, regulation, and monitoring of work are far beyon what the independent shopkeeper experienced in terms of minute supervision....

Why take of the cudgels for a class that remains relatively anonymous and is surely not, in the Marxist parlance, a class für sich? There are several reasons. I believe that the petite bourgeoisie and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies. Autonomy and freedom are, along with mutuality, at the center of an anarchist sensibility. Second, I am convinced that the petite bourgeoisie performs vital social and economic services under any political system....It is surely the case that "big box" stores can, owing again to their clout as buyers, deliver a host of manufactured goods to consumers at a cheaper price than the petty bourgeoisie. What is not so clear, however, is whether, once one has factored in all the public goods (the positive externalities) the petty bourgeoisie provides--informal social work, public safety, the aesthetic pleasure so of an animated and interesting streetscape, a large variety of social experiences and personalized services, acquaintance networks, informal neighborhood news and gossip, a building block of social solidarity and public action, and (in the case of the smallholding peasantry) good stewardship of the land--the petty bourgeoisie might not be, in a full accounting, a far better bargain, in the long run, than the large impersonal capitalist firm. And, although they might not quite measure up to the Jeffersonian democratic ideal of the self-confident, independent, land-owning yeoman farmer, they approach it far more closely than the clerk at Wal-Mart or Home Depot (pp. 77, 85, 99-100).

There is much to think about in these claims--most particularly, perhaps the idea that the best way to make possible anarchic mutualism and adaptability in terms of providing order to communities is to encourage everyone to become stakeholders in the community, in the sense of being a home-owner, a business-owner, a land-owner. Certainly that is an easier and less utopian future to imagine than returning everyone back to that level of existence available in the Jeffersonian agrarian world of the 18th-century. But wouldn't that depend very much on the sort of private and public bureaucracies that Scott is wary of--the providing of loans, the building of infrastructure, the distributing of land, and much more? Very possibly! Scott is, I think, pushing us to think about the very thing that every serious student of localism and agrarianism must consider: what, if anything, of the habitus of the non-governed peoples who historically (and, in a few very limited cases, up until this very day) constructed communities outside the stifling standardization of state-scale organizations--via migratory labor practices, swidden agriculture, and more--be adopted today, given the complexity and interconnectedness of our already existing industrial and post-industrial market societies? There are no obvious answers to that question, but Scott warns against simply throwing up our hands and claiming that systemization is unavoidable in the technological world we have today, especially since our knowledge of "the world we have today" is itself a frame which gets us looking for top-down responses, ignoring the plurality, spontaneity, and particularity of actual mutualist moments. By refusing to suggest any kind of anarchist system, but instead preferring an anarchist "squint," Scott here throws out a host of philosophical and sociological ideas to chew over.

While David Graeber would likely deny it, his The Democracy Project, a partly theoretical and partly practical documentary reflection on the Occupy Movement of 2011, which he was major figure in, does very much what Scott's book does not: propose a profoundly political and revolutionary method of anarchic governance. To be fair, his "method" does not involve any particularly imposing ideological structure, consisting as it does primarily of multiple interconnected reflections on the history, development, and potential of various participatory meeting and consensus-building strategies: calling for votes, speaking publicly, expressing dissent, and so forth. But for Graeber, reflecting upon such procedures is the heart of anarchism. He defines anarchism as "a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society," which he in turn defines as "one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another hat would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence"--which means, in his view, that anarchist-inspired movements like Occupy Wall Street, with all those meetings in Zuccotti Park, was nothing less than "taking...core democratic principles to their logical conclusion" (pp. 187, 154). Thus, for him, democracy properly understood is anarchsim, because putting the power to rule in the hands of all the people--not, he emphasizes, merely property-owners, or the "rational," or other more restricted definitions of the people--points us in the direction of "the kind of reasoning that goes on...between equals" (p. 199). Graeber is highly critical of much political theory, particularly that of the Hobbseian or Humeian or Rawlsian variety, because he sees those arguments as all essentially treating citizens like self-interested children, incapable of reasonableness or collective problem-solving. He thinks that the democratic procedures which make for a real anarchic methodology--or, as he calls it, the "Anarchist Process" (p. 195)--owes more to various spiritual (particularly Native American and Quaker) traditions and feminism: in short, "the intellectual tradition of those who have, historically, tended not to be vested with the power of command" (p. 202). By eschewing the usual range of political theoretical concerns, Graeber's arguments can come off--as they often did to me, coming at these issues as I do with a training in political philosophy--as often oblivious and naive. But his conviction that, given the opportunity--that is, the assuming the absence of restrictions and regimes (including market ones) which create an artificial inequality amongst all mentally capable persons--general human reasonableness is a real possibility gives his revolutionary fervor a deeply humane sensibility:

If you propose the idea of anarchism to a roomful of ordinary people, someone will almost inevitably object: but of course we can't eliminate the state, prisons, and police. If we do, people will start killing one another....The odd thing about this prediction is that it can be empirically tested....And it turns out to be false....When I was living in the town of Arivonimamo [in Madagascar] in 1990, and wandering about the surrounding countryside, even I had no idea at first that I was living in an area where state control had effectively disappeared (I think part of the reason for my impression was that everyone talked and acted as if state institutions were still functioning, hoping no one would notice). When I returned in 2010, the police had returned, taxes were once again being collected, but everyone also felt that violent crime had increased dramatically.

So the real question we have to ask becomes: what is it about the experience of living under a state, that is, in a society where rules are enforced by the threat of prisons and police, and all the forms in inequality and alienation that makes possible, that makes it seem obvious to us that people, under such conditions, would behave in a way that it turns out they don't actually behave? The anarchist answer is simple. If you treat people like children, they will tend to act like children. The only successful method anyone has ever devised to encourage others to act like adults is to treat them as if they already are....[T]he historical experience of what actually does happen in crisis situations demonstrates that even those who have not grown up in a culture of participatory democracy, if you take away their guns or ability to call their lawyers, can suddenly become extremely reasonable. This is all that anarchists are really proposing to do (pp. 206-207).

I found Graeber's voice throughout this book often annoyingly smug (I've heard the same about his celebrated book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which I've yet to read), and regularly found myself frustrated with the blithe way in which he seemed to assume the emergence of crises capable of overcoming or eliminating structural realities like "guns or [the] ability to call [one's] lawyers," without much by way of supporting socio-economic argument (while he lays out in persuasive detail the legitimacy of the economic grievances which motivated OWS at the beginning, he doesn't spend much time considering what kind of economic arrangements would enable the people to democratically do anything about those grievances). He at one point claims that he is "less interested in working out what the detailed architecture of what a free society would be like than in creating the conditions that would enable us to find out" (p. 193), but in actuality this books is focused on the tools of that finding, not the conditions of enabling. I value Graeber's extensive experience with and often sharp assessments of those tools themselves (this is a man who definitely was not frightened off by Oscar Wilde's warning that the real obstacle posed by socialism is that it would require "too many meetings"), but I wish he'd be able to see that his methodological claims could be both strengthened and qualified with a greater familiarity with many other non-anarchists and non-democrats those who have thought about governance in nonetheless similarly non-state ways (his dismissal of the term "subsidiarity," even while he strongly defends the very idea it describes is just one example of his borderline contemptuous of other ways of framing the same concerns which motivate him). Still, it's a take on anarchism worth considering.

In contrast to Scott's academic and agrarian anarchist reflections, and to Graber's highly political and revolutionary methodological ones, Henry Adam's classic semi-autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (he wrote of himself in the third-person throughout, and after meticulously and introspectively detailing his first thirty-three years of life, he skips the next twenty, without explanation to the reader, taking up the story again when he was in his early 50s in the 1890s) isn't any kind of primer on anarchism at all. Yet it is, I think, a rather revealing enacting of a certain kind of anarchist sentiment: a highly aristocratic, deeply apolitical one. Repeatedly through the book, Adams presents himself as a man born profoundly out of his own time, a person with longings and sensibilities which more properly belong to the 18th century (or earlier!) who, thanks to his family connections and wealth and the general sweep of history, finds himself reluctantly obliged to attempt to make sense of 19th century--which was, in his view, the moment where truly global systems, where patterns of exchange and governance and information become, through their size and reach, genuinely controlling, first emerged. Adams's tone is a mournful one, but a rueful one too: every stage of his life, in his telling, is the story of an attempt at mastery--by himself, by political parties, by banks, by corporations, by armies, by whole countries--over some issue or idea or project or public good, and always finding in the end that either 1) the effort was a failure, or 2) the matter took care of itself anyway, or 3) both.

This repetitiveness can actually make the book a difficult one to read, and there were times when I found it a slog...but eventually I found the very obdurance of Adams's tone somewhat appealing. It is the perspective of a Bostonian aristocrat--the grandson and great-grandson of Presidents of the United States, the son of a diplomat and vice-presidential candidate, a Harvard-educated scholar of history, a journalist and writer who, over the years, traveled around the word and met with hundreds of its movers and shakers--whose education convinces him, through constant trial and error, that there is no political effort that can possibly interfere with the grand historical forces that will always reach their end....thus suggesting that it is far better to simply, always, leave things alone. For example, at the age of 30, while everyone around him seems convulsed with arguments over Charles Darwin, he "turned resolutely to business, and attacked the burning question of specie payments." After wading through thousands of documents, he concludes, to his surprise, that currency restrictions--the commonly accepted logical approach to being able to continue redeeming paper money with gold--was a "fatal mistake, and that the best treatment of a debased currency was to let it alone....Time and patience were the remedies" (p. 233). This detached, observational, mildly bemused attitude is proved, in Adams's writings, to be the only healthy one, again and again and again.

You'd be forgiven, I think, for reading the above--or any number of other passages from Adams's Education--and thinking that he sounds more like Stoic fatalist than an anarchist; in what way does his lack of faith in any orchestrated human political or economic system necessarily mean that he opposes such? I think that has to be discerned through his own association with men like George Cabot Lodge, who took upon themselves the label "conservative Christian anarchist," a label which Adams seemed to find thoughtful and worth being aligned with--if only because it suggested, in line with Adams's understanding of Hegel and Schopenhauer, that there is a spirit in history, which makes itself manifest through natural processes. The modern, 19th-century world--the world "ruled by one great emperor: Coal" (p. 415)--looked in vain for some unity or synthesis with that natural spirit, but could not find it, because its own dynamism was directly opposed to it....though that opposition itself was an antithesis which would, eventually, be resolved. In the meantime the unities of medieval Christendom--which Adams envied, though he had no religious faith whatsoever, a fact which bothered him mildly--haunted the modern world, and reminded those both blessed and doomed to endure their ever-imposing, expanding, industrial moment that there were other orders, ones which are revealed through the inertia of nature. Anarchy thus becomes a conservative posture, protecting simple and local pleasures, an apolitical position which, in its resistance to the enlisting ideologies of modernity, holds onto a proper aristocratic distance from those who would try, in Adams's view, to use the state to change the economic and natural laws of the world. And this, by the way, would include the more revolutionary styles of anarchism itself:

By rights, he should have been also a Marxist, but some narrow trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he tried in vain to make himself a convert....He too had played with anarchy; thought not with socialism, which, to young men who nourished artistic emotions under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed hopelessly bourgeois, and lowest middle-class....To the conservative Christian anarchist, the amicable doctrines of Kropotkin were sentimental ideas of Russian mental inertia covered with the names of anarchy merely to disguise their innocence; and the outpourings of Élisée Reclus were ideals of the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of anarchy except as a momentary stage towards order and unity....With them, as with the socialist, communist, or collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no relation; if anarchists needed order, they must go back to the twelfth century where their thought had enjoyed its thousand years of reign. The conservative Christian anarchist could have no associate, no object, no faith except the nature of nature itself; and his "larger synthesis" had only the fault of being so supremely true that even the highest obligation of duty could scarcely oblige Bay Lodge [playing the "antithesis" role] to deny it in order to prove it. Only the self-evident truth that no philosophy of order--except the Church--had ever satisfied the philosopher reconciled the conservative Christian anarchist to prove his own....He admitted that, for the moment, the darkness was dense. He could affirm with confidence, even to himself, that his "largest synthesis" would certainly turn out to be chaos....The play of thought for thought's sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a hundred million horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light (pp. 225, 405, 407-408).

There are many reasons why Education was one of the best books I read this year: among them, Adams's unceremonial--yet therefore all the more marvelous--invocation of the distant world of early American elites, his insightful (and trenchant) reflections on technology and academia, and his grasp of a world which, in his lifetime, truly began to be globalized. But also, I include his take here along with Scott's and Graeber's because Adams's anarchism, while only very distantly relevant to the intellectual projects I mentioned at the beginning of this post, is a distinct and important one. It presents us with anarchism--as opposed to libertarianism, as traditionally understood; Adams seemed to have little interest in the matter of individual liberty, viewing "anti-slavery politics" as mainly a component of his own Puritan inheritance and an opportunity for youthful mischief rather than intellectually important in itself--as a conservative, laissez-faire force. Since the spirit of the world is ineluctable, why attempt to master it? Leave it alone instead.

The very nature of the overwhelmingly majority human communities throughout history, whether large or small, is, I think, inherently incompatible with that call. It may be the case that some human associations will form solely for the purpose of sharing information or solace, but I strongly suspect there is no enduring example of any such which doesn't, sooner or later, in ways large or small (or both), attempt to organize, distribute, cultivate, and provide some good which was simply unavailable to those living alone. In other words, the problem of seeking to master something--a plot of land, a religious question, an enemy tribe, a health care demand, a moral fear--cannot be simply walked away from. For that reason, if anarchism is to help us (particularly those of us on the left), I think it has to point us towards various agrarian or democratic or other possibilities; it has to give us, in other words, some insight into governance. Adams's conservative Christian anarchism doesn't do that--but perhaps it is also helpful to know where anarchism cannot help us, by always reminding us of those who, given their druthers, would rather take no part whatsoever in the whole game of who imposes upon whom, whether done democratically or tyrannically. So this year, though these three books as well as others, I've developed a sense of both anarchic contributions, and of anarchic limits. Not a bad result, or so I hope.