Who can change the world today ?
Is there a new agent of historical change ? Could it be the commoners ? But if so: allied to who ?
This article is a meditation on ‘who can change history’, in other words what social force can function as an ‘agent’ of change, in time of transition which seems rife with ‘morbid symptoms’ ?
One of the most famous ‘contemporary’ answers to this question was of course Marxism, and its idea of the proletariat, the global brotherhood/sisterhood of working class people that create the labor value that is appropriated by the capitalist class.
This was a response to the situation in the 19th century in which the farmland of the European peasants had been appropriated, leading to a massive exodus of rural populations which ended up having to work in factories, with their own work capacity as a commodity to be sold to the owners of capital. It was a fast growing sociological group that played a vital role in the production or value creation process, and thus could withhold its work, vote for change, or more radically: take over state power. Their lives were miserable and they had good reason to fight for change. The vision of a universal brotherhood/sisterhood of working people that could change society had a vital messianic power, that eventually brought labor parties to influential positions, and in some countries, led to the overthrow of governments.
In the 20th cy. much has changed to make that analysis out-dated to a substantial degree. First of all, organized labor did achieve substantial societal reforms that made its situation immeasurably better, themselves becoming consumers in a capitalist state, with limited work hours, pensions, unemployment benefits etc… It also transpired that the global working class was not a workable identity: in the 20th cy world wars, the labor parties and millions of working people happily slaughtered each other in the world wars, in the name of their national identities. In addition the Soviet system that emerged after the victory of the October revolution, though it was relatively successful in achieving rapid industrialization, also was very repressive, turned out to be unable to adapt to the cybernetic requirements of knowledge societies, and eventually collapsed, finally killing off the utopian charge of the messianic Marxist message.
Today, there remains a dwindling minority of academics that are divorced from any relationship to the working class, only furnishing critical methodologies to critique society, but not to change it. While Marx had said the point of philosophy had to be, not to interpret, but to change the world, the focus is now again on mere critique and interpretation.
Paradoxically, after the systemic crisis of 2008, but even before under neoliberal dislocation, what remained of the western working class turned towards the right-wing populists, while the left parties, with remaining social-democratic characteristics, became the managers of a declining welfare state, slowing the deterioration of the physical conditions for workers but not much more. They gradually became representatives of the educated urbanites, the cognitive class, moving from societal radicalism to accepting soft and hard forms of identity politics. The left became the ‘cultural-liberal’ wing of economic-liberal neoliberalism. In the Global South, the number of ‘proletarian’ and industrial workers has exploded, but there are no signs at all that their demands are translated into the old socialist ideologies.
But let us be clear: it is not because labor has given up a belief in a global messianic role, that the structural analysis around class has lost all its value, it remains a vital category to understand social conflict. But clearly, the dialectic relationship between two classes vying for power, remains a simplification and reductionist understanding of the complexity of modern society. Identities are complex and cannot be reduced to one’s structural role in society.
So, how can we complexify such an understanding? A good source for this is Bertrand de Jouvenel’s analysis in his book, ‘On Power’, which we could understand as a more ‘trialectic’ approach, based on three players rather than two. How does this analysis work ?
So, whereas Marxism always looks for two contending powers, the managerial vs the productive classes, de Jouvenel sees three players:
At the top is a central power, which seeks to eliminate limits to its power
In the middle are various decentralized power holders, which hold different forms of ‘sphere sovereignty’ or more regionally specific territorial power. Think here essentially about for example the aristocracy, and how they may want to defend their own power against that of a central king.
On the bottom are the various working and middle classes that live in the towns and cities of the realm; you could say they are a distributed power.
You probably see where this is going: de Jouvenel invites us to look at how, very frequently in human history, it is the top that seeks to mobilize the bottom against the middle. Paradoxically, de Jouvenel would argue that a lot of seemingly bottom up social revolutions, in fact create the conditions for centralized state power, because they eliminate regional differences and decentralized powers.
But in this context, it is possible to look at political strife as a matter of competing ‘jurisdictional alliances’. According to Mark Whitaker (Ecological Revolutions, 2009), there are degradative alliances, which use state power to extract wealth from humans and nature, and degrade the physical environment, but it is possible to look at historical examples of ‘regenerative’ alliances, in which these coalitions take power to reform their societies to make them more compatible with ecological balance and social justice. With this viewpoint, it becomes possible to flexibly look at the possibilities of jurisdictional alliances, which could unite top, middle and lower layers of the population, as the agent of change for an improved social order. I cannot recommend this book enough as it gives detailed historical examples of the deployment of such societal alliances, in medieval Japan, ancient China, and post-Roman Europe. This is ‘trialectics’ in action.
Earl Thompson, in his book ‘Ideology and the Evolution of Vital Institutions’, adds a further layer of complexity, by stressing the tension between the ruling class and the managerial class. To make it simple, the ruling class rules, but doesn’t ‘manage’, so it always needs to choose the composition of its managerial class, which happens to be driven by ideological conflicts. So the ruling class must choose which ideological faction of the managerial class best serves its interests in a particular context; this gives rise to various political orders, as a particular managerial ideology molds the institutions.
For example, after WWII, with millions of working class people have risked and given their life for their nation, some of them returning with their weapons, as in France and Italy; and with the existence of a Soviet Union as a counter-systemic example, it seems pretty clear that some form of Keynesianism was required, an ideology of class compromise, which could mobilize labor leaders in the pacification of post-War society, establishing a formal welfare state model. When the energy crisis and hyper-inflation broke out in 1973, and Keynesian strategy proved helpless, the ruling class looked out for an alternative approach, and found it in the Mount Pelerin Society of Milton Friedman, a originally very small dissident group which was eventually elevated to be the model ideology of neoliberalism. After the failure of cybernetic reforms in the Soviet Union, which could not accept distributed systems threatening the centralized rule of the Party, and after the failure of democratic cybernetics in Chile, the Chicago Boys were effectively positioned to apply the cybernetically managed global supply chain that determined the next phase of globalization.
In a review of a recent book on the changing of such political orders, Branko Milanovic describes the process:
“How does an ideology become a “political order”? There is a “silent phase” of order’s construction that involves intellectuals and their theories. For neoliberalism, we have to go back to the Walter Lippmann’s Paris Colloquia, and Hayek’s and Mises’ Vienna and then more recently to Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Rush Limbaugh…Consider the years: Heritage Institution founded in 1974, Cato Institute 1974, Manhattan Institute 1976, Moral Majority defined in 1979. Ideology is then propagated throughout the public and gets adopted by one or several political movements and parties. It does not become an “order” however until it gets accepted, or, as Gerstle likes to write, until it is “acquiesced to” by other parts of the political spectrum that at first rejected it. (Margaret Thatcher is cited as saying that her greatest success was that her policies were continued by Tony Blair.)”
Earl Thompson offers a crucial warning though, which cautions as to the current choice for imperial ideology, which was chosen after the panic of 2011, when the Occupy movement crafted an unacceptable strategy directly straightforwardly against the 1% and the ruling elites chose to massively support identity politics as the new hegemony.
Indeed, in the 17th century, when the hegemon was the Dutch Republic, the dutch ruling merchants made a crucial mistake, by listening to those ‘archeo-liberals’ which advised them to abolish the guild system on the grounds that they were slowing innovation and adaptability. The result was that the urban working class, which had a stake in the earlier wars, no longer wanted to risk their lives, and this refusal to fight in the wars ushered in the end of Dutch hegemony. Thus, ruling classes can make the wrong choices and choose the wrong ideological factions. This seems certainly the case today.
Certainly in the West, different analyses have put forward that the main dividing factor in politics has become the educational level, with educated urbanites (aka the managerial class) voting for the culturally progressive parties, and the less educated working class and rural population voting for the populist right. The ‘left’ of the Western political spectrum, which used to represent the working class electorate, fought for political rights related to free speech and pluralism, and represented color-blind anti-racism, and generally opposed imperial wars, has radically reversed itself on all these different axis, representing the interests of a threatened managerial class, more closely aligning to the ruling financial class, while the right-populist end of the spectrum has aligned itself with the frustrations of the working class and rural populations. In the U.S. the Democrat part of the electorate represents 70% of societal wealth, and the Republican electorate the bottom 30%. It is perhaps time to refresh the concept of the ‘plebs’, since the Republican coalition is not a revival of a working class movement, but more of a coalition of all the segments of the population which are being impoverished by neoliberal globalization. Hence the pertinence of the new sociology which divides the Somewheres, rooted to their locality without possibility of escape, and the Nowheres, the flexible digitized cognitive classes who can arbitrage not just territories but even nations, less subject the disruptive consequences of the (post-)neoliberal crisis, but still sufficiently threatened to become ‘conservative’ and seeing the ‘plebs’ as a threat.
So it is clear that the political left can no longer be seen as an agent of change, but it is hard to see the political right as a solution to systemic issues, as it also sees itself as a force of preservation, focusing on the pre-neoliberal model of industrial capitalism. This rendering ‘obsolete’ of the classic political polarization, though it still exists in zombie format, means the ushering in of an entirely new era of societal polarization, on different axes.
The French Revolution could be seen as the end of an era in which societal differences and conflicts were expressed in religious terms, ushering in the period of modernity in which differences were expressed in terms of political polarities between left and right, even if the meaning of these polarities changed quite fundamentally over time. But today, it would seem that this very polarity is at stake.
So where can we find today, a potential agent of change ?
In my own work around the commons and its place in human history and civilization, I have put forward a schema of change that focuses on the existence of seed forms, which set in motion new social divisions. Let me explain.
Think of the Roman imperial system as based on slavery, taxation/tribute of conquered lands, and trade, with slave owners and slaves as the main social and structural distinction, with a marginalized proletariat in the cities. When this system started declining, people started fleeing the cities, developing new productive systems outside the existing paradigm. So the ‘exodus’ from the declining system was coupled with the societal experimentation, aka ‘seed forms’, that eventually created new forms of production and exchange, through the monasteries and the emerging institution of serfdom. Eventually, a new model of society arose, with feudal lords and serfs as the managerial and productive classes of the new era. Then again, when that system ended into crisis, ‘enclosures’ of land forced the rural population to flee to the cities, where the industrial bourgeoisie and the new urban and industrial proletariat elaborated new forms of value creation and exchange, inaugurating capitalism.
It seems to me that something similar is happening today. My contention is that the exodus of the ‘salariat’ as the main institution of industrial capitalism, is creating a precariat of intellectual and service workers, and that these social forces initially used the digital commons to interconnect and create new forms of sociality and value creation.
The first wave created movements such as free software and open design, and widespread experiments in distributed manufacturing.
A second wave, after the crisis of 2008, created a wave of urban and rural commons that re-organized provisioning systems through various forms of mutualization. (we calculated a tenfold increase in the ten years after 2008)
A third wave, linked to the invention of Bitcoin and the blockchain, led to the construction of trans-local infrastructures of value creation and exchange.
In our work at the P2P Foundation, we have outlined various scenarios of how social forces are mobilizing these new techno-social policies, such as ‘netarchical capitalism’, which represents the interests of the platform owners (the ‘techno-feudalism’ a la Yanis Varoufakis), the ‘distributed capitalism’ of the libertarian crowds, , the urban commons model, now merging with bioregional regeneration, and the global digital commons of the original open source models. The most interesting developments are now represented by hybrid models which attempt to align various social models, which could be seen as a potential form of ‘coalition building’. The current web3 iterations for example have an extremely strong focus on community, open source, funding of public goods, and orientation towards regenerative projects.
To understand the importance of this, despite its emergent nature, it might be interesting to look at history as a succession of coordination engines.
As Hanzi Freinacht puts it:
"The coordination engine is the underlying pattern of how people coordinate their actions with one another and the material flows around them, through space and time. This means that they can coordinate via hunting-gathering and camp-fire talks, by seasonal work efforts to sow crops, through labor markets and state regulation and national currency, and so on. It’s about the economy in a wide sense: about how human activities link up with one another. Think about it: “an economy” is basically a pattern of coordination of human agency over space and time."
Before the advent of craft-agrarian civilizations in Mesopotamia, the main value creation and exchange mechanisms were ‘gifting’ and ‘commoning’ in a context of tribal and kinship based organization. But with writing, the writing elites constructed a model based on states and markets. Distinct coordination forms represent different ways of elite formation. If empires were based on writing techniques, the capital-state-nation model was clearly linked to the emergence of printing. WWI could be seen as a struggle that finally eliminated the imperial form (i.e. collapse of Austro-Hungary and Ottoman empires), replacing them with the nation-state model; while WWII was a competition between three models for the national management of industrial capitalism. Just as the merchant guilds in the free European cities eventually created the capitalist model, it is not an innocent comparison to see that new coding elites are creating trans-local coordination infrastructures that represent their world view and social conditions.
In this context, three societal models are at play, which can be summarized as East-West-Digital:
The Western model, based on global trade, U.S. hegemony, and perhaps with the World Economic Forum representing its aims for societal reform: a world based on global and domain-specific multi-stakeholder alliances, with global finance at the helm, and weakened nation-states and approved global NGO’s as partners. But no direct role for the people. The aim is to perpetuate the current global unipolar hegemony. These forces, in their panic vis a vis the internal populist challenge, are trying to control knowledge and information flows through algorithmic policing at scale, a process that is presently accelerating.
The ‘Eastern’ Eurasian, ‘Global South’ model of multipolarity, based on restoring the sovereignty of the nation-states though more and more in the garb of ‘civilization states’. Needless to say, the populist forces in the West, which are also sovereignist, feel a certain attraction to this state-centric model as well.
The ‘Digital’ world of trans-locality, inspired by decentralized models of coordination, coupled with the transformation of local provisioning systems through urban commons, representing a new ‘cosmo-local’ model of civilization.
In this ‘East-West-Digital’ dynamic, we can interpret the East-West dynamic representing the polarization between market and state forces, a continuation of the 10,000 year struggle ‘within’ the civilizational model, while Digital represents the transformative potential of inter-civic planetarization. Civilization being essentially a geographic arrangement between city and countryside, this represents a fundamental change in societal logic.
Echoing Kojin Karatani’s dynamic between Mode A and Mode D in human history, Hanzi Freinacht sees a similar dynamic between the ‘Coordination Engines’ and the reactive ‘Purification Generators’.
As a reminder, Karatani’s Mode A stands for the value regime that was operative under tribal/kinship based modalities of human organizing, i.e. gifting and commoning; he shows that, as they were replaced with the more ‘alienating’ mode B (States) and mode C (Markets), there has been a constant yearning to update Mode A, i.e. bring back the convivial modes of human organizing at a higher civilizational model, and he sees the world religions as the historical attempts to do this. This is what he calls Mode D.
In a quite similar fashion, the ‘metamodern’ analyst Hanzi Freinacht sees how the disruptive force of new coordination engines is periodically challenged by these Purification Generators:
"First we have the emergence of a new way of production and governance, a new “hard” Coordination Engine … — and then we have a critique of the new hard facts of life, which brings about a cultural revolution of sorts, the cultural superstructure or so-called “purification generator”, that manages to make life more tolerable, more fair, and a little less brutal, but without replacing the productive and governmental foundation of society."
This is very similar to the dynamics described by Karatani, in which a ‘revolutionary’ world religion eventually becomes an imperial religion, but which civilizes and softens the previous civilizational iteration.
I should note that where we differ in our interpretation is where Freinacht sees ‘wokism’ as postmodernism coming into power:
“The power pomos are here to stay, and they are becoming increasingly intimate with the governing control structures of Modern society.”
I agree with this conclusion that wokism is the imperial religion of the day, but, this is why I referenced Earl Thompson earlier on, I do not believe it is a viable option to move to a higher level of civilization. I think the ruling classes made a ‘mistake’, as weird as this may sound. In short, my analysis would be that identity politics is ‘de-civilization’, not post-civilization. If post-modernism was justified as a deconstructive critique of the unreasonable certainties of objectivist modernism, wokism is in many aspects the very re-essentialization (of race, gender, etc…) that postmodernism fought against, a process of ideological regression very well described in the book, Cynical Theories.
The reason is that it is not viable as a ‘jurisdictional alliance’ because it is based on the social hatred of the working classes and their values, and it is not an ideology that can inspire a regeneration of civilization. On the contrary, it reflects the implosion of the current civilizational model, which has reached its ecological and social limits, and reflects the panic of the managerial class and its fear of the popular classes.
Pitirim Sorokin, in his ‘Social and Cultural Dynamics’ stresses the oscillatory dynamics of civilizational processes. When a civilizational model reaches its limits, it creates a counter-reaction, which eventually becomes the root of a new civilization. Identity politics is not a counter-reaction, since, as Freinacht readily admits, it is already in power, rather, it represents the final corruption of an increasingly unworkable model, and it is rooted in classes that are in overproduction and parasitic towards the real material value creation.
In my view, a successful ‘ regenerative jurisdictional alliance’ would be a different beast altogether:
One that gives new life to the native productive forces in each bioregion and national territory, i.e. regenerates the productive classes of society above all, and can bind them to the regime
One that takes advantage of the new coordination capabilities of new technologies
And that can get the support of at least a fraction of the ruling class.
The agent of change today can only be a new convergence between:
New hyperproductive and social forces, i.e. the combination of regenerative local commons hyper-empowered by cosmo-local technologies
Fractions of popular and ruling classes which ally with these new regenerative social forces to reinvent the coordination mechanisms
This is why I am quite hopeful in one particular social formation, which has as yet to prove itself: Sarah Wagenknecht’s BSW.
I should admit here my own evolution. Originally, when I developed the tactics and strategies of the ‘partner state’ model, a form of state that enables and empowers individual and social autonomy and cooperation, it seemed to me that the ideal political coalitions were the red-green coalitions, and I did such work with national (Ecuador) and municipal (Ghent) governments, with only very limited success. But these forces are nearly everywhere in disarray as their growing move towards identity politics is fatally weakening their remaining bonds with the majority of the population, especially the working and rural classes. That of course doesn’t mean that the other side of the ‘zombie’ spectrum presents the right conditions to accompany such a transition.
But nevertheless remains at the center of my analysis: we have to ally the cosmo-local commons-centric and regenerative seed forms, with supportive jurisdictional alliances.
Perhaps naively, I am looking with great interest to the electoral victory of the BSW in Germany, as Sarah Wagenknecht seems to represent a viable synthesis between redistributive policies, ecological re-orientation, and cultural moderation in the culture war.
Well written, Michel. I agree that " we have to ally the cosmo-local commons-centric and regenerative seed forms, with supportive jurisdictional alliances" and believe David Ronfeldt is correct in stating "a fourth sphere/realm may emerge (e.g., a commons realm with the network or equinet form at its core and constructed of and around care-centered actors and activities, namely health, education , welfare, the environment)".
But rather emerging from some political party top-down, I believe it could more likely emerge bottom up at the grassroots level. Governments don't do well in the as care-centered actors in the areas of health, education, welfare, and the environment. Their efforts in these areas have been disasters of profit motivated corporate capture. Conversely, nonprofit organizations have done a much better job since they are not profit motivated and must act for the public good to avoid taxation. In the US, municipalities are also tax exempt for the same reason, but their model is extrativist through taxation.
What I see as a possible catalyst for a fourth emergence is hybrid - a resident directed municipality staffed by residents, run as a nonprofit organization that provides paid products & services in the areas health, education & skills training, hospitality & recreation, craft guilds, and regenerative agroecology, and thereby provides to its resident employees jobs, housing, education, healthcare, etc. as benefits of employment. A successful hybrid model of this nature could go viral at the grassroots level and be the required change agent that could obsolete remote centralize political machinations.
Wow, Michel, I'm enthused to learn about "sphere sovereignty" for the first time. With a few adjustments (maybe realm instead of sphere) and less religion, it fits beautifully with several of TIMN's dynamics: the evolution occurs through the emergence of new forms of organization, that a new sphere/realm of society emerges around a cardinal new form and its core principles, that each form/sphere has its own particular strengths and limits, that intrusions into other form's realms is dysfunctional, etc.
I'll have to read more to be sure, but I don't anything about how spheres may evolve in social terms, whether society may be regarded as having three cardinal spheres/realms today (civil society + government + market system, and most importantly, whether, how, and why a fourth sphere/realm may emerge (e.g., a commons realm with the network or equinet form at its core and constructed of and around care-centered actors and activities, namely health, education, welfare, the environment). I do see mention that business should not be taking over education, which is a point in the right direction.
Anyway, an instructive post! Thanks.