1. Expanding the Autonomous Sphere – Andre Gorz. (See for example, Critique of Economic Reason, Verso, London, 1989, 250 pages.) It is necessary to distinguish the strategy I have been describing from one proposed by Andre Gorz which sounds similar in many ways but isn't. Gorz has done a lot to refocus our attention on the liberation from work, and for this he must be thanked. But I cannot agree with the solution he advocates. Gorz divides the social world into heteronomous and autonomous spheres. He wants us to get more and more time free for the sphere of autonomous activity but he wants to keep, indefinitely, the heteronomous sphere, the sphere of economic calculation, "the sphere of economically rational commodity activities," in other words, the sphere of capitalism, which he now however calls industrialism. Thus Gorz has abandoned any desire to destroy capitalism completely, he just wants it to control less and less of our lives. He wants us to start spending less and less time in waged work until it becomes a negligible part of our lives. With the rest of our time we can do whatever we want, but his description of this "autonomous activity" sounds suspiciously like the leisure activities in a commodity culture, or even worse, like subsistence labor. Unlike my proposal, which also calls for pulling time, energy, and wealth out of capitalism, he does not seek to eventually destroy capitalism, but rather leaves it intact together with the state, which will administer a "social wage", another feature of his plan. At a time when capitalists are busy dismantling the welfare state, it seems somewhat misguided to pin ones hopes on a state administered guaranteed annual income. Nor does Gorz face up to the fierce resistance capitalists will put up to anyone trying to escape wage-labor. Keeping millions of people unemployed or on dole (if they're lucky) is an essential feature of the wage-slave system, and always has been. Gorz's proposal presupposes therefore that radicals have gotten control of the state apparatus and have succeeded in instituting shorter hours, and a whole array of other proposals, including a social wage. It will never happen.

      Gorz characterizes proposals like mine as "fundamentalist anti-modern or pre-modern." He thinks they are nostalgic, and seek to return to pre-capitalist times. But the desire for an association of democratic autonomous neighborhoods does not mean that these neighborhoods will be completely self-sufficient (or even mostly so), isolated and separate, like manors or villages in the middle ages. They will not be autonomous in the material sense; they will be autonomous in that no one will govern them. They will be self-governing. There will obviously be enormous networks for interchanging goods, probably more than there are now, but this circulation will serve human need not capitalist greed. And it will be intelligent. We won't be eating lettuce and tomatoes shipped in from across a continent. Things that can be grown or made locally will be. But people in the south will still want to eat wheat and potatoes and people in the north will want to eat avocados and bananas. The association of autonomous neighborhoods we are talking about is not a regression; it is an advance. It represents a higher level of civilization than will ever be possible under capitalism. People seem to think that if it weren't for the profit motive humans would never do anything brilliant, never invent labor saving machines, never produce more than they immediately need. This is absurd. Capitalism is now nothing but a fetter on the creative genius of the human species. The so-called wonders of capitalism will look positively shabby beside the truly marvelous creations of free peoples.

      2. Libertarian Municipalism – Murray Bookchin. It is necessary to distinguish the strategy I'm proposing from the libertarian municipalism of Murray Bookchin. (See Janet Biehl, The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipal, for an exposition and references to the relevant Bookchin texts.) Bookchin's hostility to workplace organizing goes way back. Already in his 1968 essay, "The Forms of Freedom," published in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, he sketches his rejection of workers councils, in preference for popular assemblies. But at least in that essay he still recognized that workers councils are a "revolutionary means of appropriating the bourgeois economy". But over the years, this role for workers has disappeared. In the essays on libertarian municipalism, beginning in 1985 (although most of the themes were present much earlier), work, workers, and workplaces have all but disappeared, and his strident rejection of anarcho-syndicalism has intensified. A recent essay, published in Left Green Perspectives (No. 41, January, 2000), reasserts once again his belief that worker-managed workplaces and cooperatives cannot be part of a revolutionary strategy. The whole stress is on getting Popular Assemblies. But he wants to do this by winning elections in local municipalities!

      I do not believe that we could turn the existing town governments into assemblies based on direct democracy even if we won the elections (and I do not even believe in elections). They are too intimately linked with state and federal bureaucracies. I think we have to bypass the existing municipal governments and strike directly for neighborhood assemblies. But this by itself would never succeed. It has to be combined with the struggles for workplace assemblies and household assemblies. Mine is a three-pronged approach. You have to fight for direct democracy and self-rule everywhere (even in the existing multitude of voluntary organizations and non-profit corporations). The Home Assembly will be the supreme decision-making unit, but it cannot just be created out of the blue, separately from, and in isolation of, everything else (the rest of social life).

      In Bookchin's proposal it is not clear at all how these liberated municipalities are even going to get control of "the economy" (a category which I reject by the way), although that is an objective of his plan. He never any more mentions seizing the means of production at the point of production. Production is to be taken over by towns. But he never explains how. He rarely talks much anymore, in his strategy writings, about cooperative labor as a foundation for a free communal life (although this theme is of course present in his earlier theoretical writings). Nor does he talk much anymore about abolishing wage-slavery. He rarely talks about money, markets, or trade. Domestic democracy, and hence reproductive freedom, is not part of his strategy either.

      One reason, among others, why he rejects workplace struggles is his long-standing identification of the proletariat with just industrial workers. It is surprising that such an erudite man could have made such an elementary error, but there it is. Naturally, if the working class is now just a tiny minority operating the rapidly disappearing industrial factories, rather than a class that encompasses practically the entire population of the planet, then there obviously can't be much of a role for it in making a revolution.

      This body of work by Bookchin is very long on philosophy but short on concrete details. The actual proposal is usually summarized in one short paragraph, enmeshed in pages of theorizing. It's a heavy theoretical load to hang by such a thin thread. Here is a typical example from "The Meaning of Confederalism":
 

"What, then, is confederalism? It is above all a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. The members of these confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves. Their function is thus a purely administrative and practical one, not a policy-making one like the function of representatives in republican systems of government."

      That's it! Then back to the philosophizing. Back to expositions on the meaning of citizenship (a concept which is perhaps too closely tied to the nation-state and representative democracy to be any longer usable). And this is thought to represent direct democracy. My apologies, but I don't think so.

      On the other hand, a lot of his philosophizing is very useful in clarifying the meaning of decentralized social arrangements. He is certainly correct to focus on the local popular assembly as the cornerstone of a free, democratic, autonomous social life. Moreover, most of the limitations of a strategy based solely on worker-managed workplaces, which Bookchin calls attention to, are correct. In and of themselves, worker-owned workplaces can never overthrow capitalism. Thus, seizing the means of production can never lead by itself to the overthrow of capitalism either, or to the establishment of a new social world. We also have to seize decision-making power in general away from the ruling class and relocate it in our neighborhood assemblies, abolish labor as a commodity, and get out of markets based on commodities made for profit.

      Bookchin has thrown out the baby with the bath. It is so sad that such a scholarly anarchist, with his voluminous writings, and widespread reputation and following, could have latched so doggedly upon this badly flawed strategy, one that could never succeed in a million years.

      3. An Imaginative Utopia – Bolo'Bolo. This is a marvelously creative work (by P.M., Bolo'Bolo, Semiotext(e), 1985, 198 pages). It shows what can be thought up by an anarchist with a vivid imagination. Everyone who is interested in building a decentralized world of free communal peoples should read this book.

      This said, we're forced to recognize that this scheme is riddled with contradictions. It is based, typically for an anarchist, on federation. Yet somehow this doesn't constitute hierarchy in p.m.'s view. In addition to the Bolo (neighborhood), p.m. projects these other units – towns, counties, regions, and the world. There are assemblies on each of these levels with certain powers and responsibilities. P.M.'s assumption that these assemblies will not get out of control is a little too facile for my taste. For instance, on page 149, p.m. writes: "A planetary assembly and its organisms can only do what the participating regions let them do." Well, in this scheme, lower level assemblies and bolos do control the resources, so maybe this will be true. But still, it worries me.

      This book is perhaps best described as a detailed account, in advance, of customs and traditions that might evolve over a long period of time in an anarchist culture. But to present them like this, all at once, out of the blue, by fiat as it were, makes them seem almost as if they have been legislated. Bolos will do this. Bolos won't do that. Every traveler will be granted three days hospitality by any Bolo. No one can be expelled from a Bolo. Damages caused by fights (an accepted way of resolving personal conflicts) must be paid for by the contestants. Inside Bolos, there can't be any rules – yet the whole book is loaded with rule after rule, many of which would most probably have to be enforced somehow. But how? We're going to have state-of-the-art hospitals, advanced communication systems, well-kept roads, all maintained by compulsory labor if need be (that is, if there aren't enough volunteers) – each Bolo supplying a certain number of compulsory labor hours every year. Hold on a minute. Can't we do better than this? I certainly hope so.

      There is also the flaw that, in p.m.'s view, our current misery is caused not by capitalism, but by the Planetary Work Machine. This is a novel way of saying it, I guess, and is refreshing for a while. But ultimately, it is unacceptable. It reduces our understanding and causes us to misidentify the enemy. It's foolish to jettison the knowledge gained from centuries of scholarly analysis of, and militant resistance to, the historical social order known as capitalism, for the sake of a few poetic phrases. Let's face it. We live under capitalism, and there is no getting around it.

      4. Realistic Utopias – Ralph Miliband, Daniel Singer. Here are two brilliant, committed radicals, both highly educated and deeply knowledgeable, but who nevertheless suffer a failure of imagination when it comes to getting out of capitalism and getting free. They can't seem to shake loose from the nation-state. Their cases illustrate the profound tragedy we suffered when marxists drove anarchists out of the revolution, and succeeded in keeping them out for so very long, for over a century. Both men come from strong marxist backgrounds, although certainly neither of them could be considered an orthodox marxist; indeed, they each have done a lot to create a radical politics relevant to our own times. Even though marxists themselves believe that communism is a stateless society, that idea has receded so far into the background that it has no current relevance for them in their anti-capitalist struggles. As a consequence, the best they can picture is a 'realistic utopia' (a phrase used by Singer), by which they mean a utopia that can actually be achieved given present conditions. And for them that means working through the state. Which is what these two radicals propose.

      Ralph Miliband, in Socialism for a Sceptical Age (Verso, London, 1994, 221 pages), presents an admirable summary of the case against capitalism (chapter one), and an equally admirable summary of socialist aspirations in general (chapter two) – the struggle for democracy, equality, and social control over the economy – ideas which most radicals can agree with. But then the problems begin, the most important of which is that Miliband still believes that these ideals can be achieved in a state. He thinks completely within the nation-state framework. He is well aware of course of the historical failure of social democracy in Europe. In fact he analyzes for us of one of the most striking recent examples of such failure, the government of Mitterand in France. Mitterand came to power with widespread public support, respectably radical intentions, and a majority in the government. He got nowhere. His program of reforms was blocked, by capitalists, by the ruling class. He was thwarted. So Miliband is aware of the intense resistance that capitalists can throw up against any serious attempt to change the system, and of the many weapons they are able to deploy. But he doesn't give up on the strategy. He still thinks it is possible for socialists to win control of a government through elections and then use the state to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. He devotes one long chapter, "The Politics of Survival" (chapter six), to discussing various things that a socialist government might do to ward off attacks by the ruling class, stay in power, and get to socialism. (Communism, in the original sense, as a stateless society, seems to have disappeared from his vision.)

      Daniel Singer's recent book, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1999, 295 pages), advances similar themes. But for him it is not merely possible to use the state, but necessary (although he does keep the traditional, ultimate goal of dissolving the state, eventually). A state is needed to fend off the capitalists' "terrible attack, including flight of capital, trade restrictions, boycotts, and possibly, more violent means," which is sure to come. A state, controlled by radicals (communists, socialists) is essential to defeat this counter-revolution and engineer the transition from capitalism to socialism.

      These are completely unrealistic strategies. They are not realistic utopias, but pipe dreams. It has long puzzled me how some revolutionaries can continue hanging on to the two stage strategy – first capture the state, and then establish communism by abolishing the state (and capitalism) – in the face of the overwhelming failure of this strategy, through nearly a century of experience now, first in Russia and Eastern Europe with Leninism, then in Western Europe with Social Democracy, and finally all over the colonial world in National Liberation Struggles. These long historical struggles have proved beyond any doubt that it is impossible to get to true communism, that is to a stateless society, that is, to anarchism, by getting control of a state. What does it take to discredit a strategy? Why don't we be really realistic, and admit that we have no choice but to try another approach?

      5. Utopistics – Immanuel Wallerstein. In this new book, Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century (The New Press, New York, 1998, 93 pages), Wallerstein offers some modest proposals for a different social world. Wallerstein coined the word utopistics because he wants us to remember that he is not proposing utopia. "Utopistics is the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgment as to the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems. It is the sober, rational, and realistic evaluation of human social systems, the constraints on what they can be, and the zones open to human creativity. Not the face of the perfect (and inevitable) future, but the face of an alternative, credibly better, and historically possible (but far from certain) future." In this light, Wallerstein proposes several things: (1) "...the erection of nonprofit decentralized units as the underlying mode of producing within the system." These are non state controlled nonprofits, like nonprofit hospitals have traditionally been. (2) With regard to equal access to education, health care, and a guaranteed lifetime income, Wallerstein says that "It should not be difficult to place all three of these needs outside commodification, to be provided by nonprofit institutions and paid for collectively. We do this now for such things as water supply, and in some countries, libraries." (3) As for preserving the environment: "We must require all production organizations to internalize all costs, including all costs necessary to ensure that their productive activity neither pollutes nor uses up the resources of the biosphere." There are a couple of other ideas, like for "a truly democratic set of political institutions," and like keeping money out of politics so that there will not be "financial imbalances between competing points of view".

      Are these proposals really historically possible? Wallerstein has done as much as anyone to analyze the two stage strategy and to show why it failed, and how it could not have succeeded. He is also aware that we face a terrible enemy. "The privileged are inevitably better informed and thereby socially smarter than they have been. They are also far wealthier, and they have far stronger and more effective means of destruction and repression than they ever did before." So aren't they going to try to block these proposals from being adopted? And how will that be countered?

      Elsewhere in this small book, he records his observation that a deep-seated rejection of state structures is now a world wide phenomenon. Some years ago, in an essay on strategy, he recommended placing unmeetable demands on the state and "overloading the system", and ceasing "to be terrified at the political breakdown of the system." Here in these utopistic proposals he doesn't actually say that a state would be needed for them, but he doesn't say it wouldn't be. But wouldn't the capitalist nation-state have to be abolished before you could internalize production costs or have a guaranteed lifetime income arranged through a nonprofit organization and paid for collectively, or have production done mostly in nonprofit enterprises? Isn't the very distinction between a profit and a non-profit corporation a legal artifact of capitalism itself?

      And "a truly democratic set of political institutions" can mean almost anything. It describes my proposed social arrangements, as well as many others. Are we going to try to keep bourgeois democracy but cleanse it of capitalists? If it's true that the world's peoples are in the process of rejecting state structures, like he claims, then isn't the proposal for a world of autonomous communities actually more realistic, more historically possible, than his utopistic ones? Isn't anarchism implied in his call for "the erection of nonprofit decentralized units as the underlying mode of production"?

      6. A Cooperative Commonwealth – Frank Lindenfeld. ("The Cooperative Commonwealth: An Alternative to Corporate Capitalism and State Socialism," Humanity and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, February 1997, pages 3-16). This is a short essay, but it nevertheless manages to capture, in refreshingly concrete terms, the main themes of the cooperative movement. Lindenfeld believes that the seeds of a cooperative commonwealth are already present in the existing worker and consumer co-ops, community development financial institutions, and barter networks. These need to be increased in number. Then they should "forge linkages ... to form second order co-ops and federations." "As networks of cooperatives and democratically managed organizations proliferate, they may reach enough of a critical mass to transform the entire society into the cooperative commonwealth ...." But this will not happen without "a broad scale coalition of anti-corporate people's political organizations. Such a political thrust is needed to challenge the entrenched power of the transnational corporations and open them up to democratic control by their employees, as well as to modify the legal and tax framework to make it more friendly to cooperatives." In other words, we are going to legislate capitalism away! But at least Lindenfeld hates capitalism and wants to get rid of it, and is somewhat aware that there is an enemy out there, with entrenched interests. But he grossly underestimates the power and resources of that enemy. This becomes clear a little later as he begins to enumerate the standard social democratic wish list: "a constitutional amendment to keep corporations from claiming rights guaranteed to material persons"; "an absolute ban on corporate contributions to political parties, political action committees, and candidates"; "the provision of government social welfare benefits such as regional or national health insurance and a guaranteed minimum income combined with a progressive tax system that transfers income from wealthy families and corporations to those less fortunate"; "tax incentives to promote employee ownership and control"; "the charter or continuation of corporations only if they provided for substantial employee ownership and control"; and so forth. Sure, why not? Let's just keep the congress, the courts, the federal and state bureaucracies, and elections, but get control of them through a new populist movement outside the two parties, as is happening already "in the Green Party, the Alliance, the New Party and the Labor party." Then we can change the laws to make a cooperative commonwealth possible, all the while keeping the capitalists at bay with other new laws. Wonderful plan. Except that it will never work!

      7. Participatory Economics – Michael Albert. (Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century, with co-author Robin Hahnel, South End Press, Boston, 1991, 153 pages.) I suppose we shouldn't expect too much from someone with such bad taste as to label himself a Pareconist (from participatory economics). Albert doesn't disappoint us. The most glaring, god-awful mistake in this scheme is that Albert keeps the capitalist categories of economy, production, worker, and consumer, and proceeds to outline a social order based on these bad notions. For all his talk about vision, not much of it is in evidence here. You would think, following Albert, that the main purpose of life is to produce and consume. This is a highly materialistic Vision he has conjured. It is also individualistic (in spite of councils galore). To his credit, he did try at least to imagine a way out of capitalism, out of commodity markets, out of profit-taking. It's just that he is so far off the mark.

      He has each of us making out an annual list of all the goods we think we are going to need in the coming year. We then submit the list to a 'neighborhood consumers council', where the list gets meshed with everyone else's, and then added to similar lists drawn up by the ward council, the city council, the county council, and so forth, on up through state and region to the national consumer council. Similar lists are generated from the production side, from workers councils and regional and industry council federations. (He presumes federation throughout, no questions asked.) All the lists are then crunched through the computers of the Iteration Facilitation Board, where everything is ironed out, resulting in a planned economy, but without planners, according to Albert.

      This has got to be the sorriest proposal in the history of utopian literature. Albert uses all the right words -- councils, self-management, participation -- good ideas taken from the radical movement. But in Albert they get morphed into a world-class monstrosity. It's as if he has embraced capitalist society in toto, but then tried to make it participatory. He keeps money, but it is not regular capitalist money, but "accounting money", and works differently, he says. He keeps prices, but they are not regular capitalist prices, but "indicative prices", and work differently. He keeps jobs, but they are now "balanced and complexed". He keeps labor time as a measure of value, but now it's okay because with balanced job complexes, "accounting money income thus equates to real socially average labor hours." He keeps wages, now called remuneration, and bases them on effort. He has an Employment Facilitation Board to help workers find jobs. He has a Household Facilitation Board to help workers find homes. There are also Production Facilitation Boards, Consumption Facilitation Boards, and Updating Facilitation Boards, as well as the above mentioned Iteration Facilitation Boards.

      Albert perverted a good radical concept, participatory democracy, which had been refurbished and relaunched by the New Left, by fusing it with the capitalist concept of economics. It is only under capitalism that certain human activities come to be labeled economic and are forcibly separated out from the rest of life, through the practices of wage-slavery and commodity markets. Humans do many things: make love, have babies, grow food, build shelters, make music, make clothes, make beautiful objects and useful things, play games, fashion tools, dream, draw, sleep, talk, write, argue, investigate. Is a symphony orchestra economic? What about a research center, a day-care center, a health clinic, a baseball team? Are these economic? Only in a world of commodified labor, where you have to have a job in order to have an income. Outside such a world, it is completely false to label some activities or projects as economic, to label some of them as production and others not, or to think of anything as consumption. Even worse is to try to build a whole social order on these distinctions and then to think of this as liberation. On the contrary, the reason a revolution is needed in the first place is to get rid of this false separation of work from life, art, fun, dreaming. All in all, Albert's Parecon is nothing short of shameful.

      Among the many things missing from Albert's Utopia (or perhaps I should say Dystopia) is any feeling that this is a new civilization we want to create, a new social world, with free association, revived neighborhoods, restored communities, local control, deliberative peoples in assemblies in control of their social lives, joyful living, reintegration of life's many activities, liberation, sanity, cooperation, direct democracy, generosity, mutual aid, discussion, fun, dancing. Instead what we get is the same old tired civilization, except in an even more tedious version. It is still an Acquisitive Society. It is still a world of Products. We are still Actors in an Economy. We work; we get paid; we buy goods; we calculate, measure, bargain, produce, consume. If this is a new world, how come we are still being called Workers? There is a horrible graphic in Looking Forward (page 85). There is a big computer in the center of the picture. Scattered around it, at widely spaced intervals, are individual desks, each with a monitor linked by a cable to the central computer. Behind each monitor sits a person, busily typing in their consumption requests for the coming year. Who the hell wants to live in a society of producers and consumers?

      8. Globalization from Below – Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, Brendan Smith. (South End Press, Boston, 2000, 164 pages.) Astonishingly, considering that Jeremy Brecher wrote Strike! as a young man, this book is not anti-capitalist. Strike! was thoroughly anti-capitalist, and was written in the tradition of the mass strike theory of Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacists, and the workers councils theory of anarcho-syndicalists and council communists. In contrast, Globalization from Below does not contemplate the destruction of capitalism, let alone the abolition of the state, not even in the long run. In this book, Brecher and his co-authors have regressed to the mainstream sociological cant of social change, social conflict, and social movements and to the old liberal theory of countervailing power. Sadly, I believe this book nevertheless expresses the prevailing conceptual framework among so-called anti-globalization protesters of recent years.

      The following paragraph expresses in a nutshell what Brecher, Costello, and Smith think is going on:
 

"In response to globalization from above, movements are emerging all over the world in social locations that are marginal to the dominant power centers. These are linking up by means of networks that cut across national borders. They are beginning to develop a sense of solidarity, a common belief system, and a common program. They are utilizing these networks to impose new norms on corporations, governments, and international institutions." (page 26)

      These movements are "composed of relatively autonomous groupings", typically, but not exclusively, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but also, on occasion, unions, churches, local social movements, intellectuals, and so forth. The authors adopt a phrase from an article in The Economist to describe this phenomenon. They call it an NGO Swarm.

      The picture here then is one of masses of people organized into special purpose organizations and single issue campaigns, who network on a global scale, and thus supposedly acquire the power to impose changes on the existing ruling class institutions. "The movement's unifying goal," the authors claim, "is to bring about sufficient democratic control over states, markets, and corporations to permit people and the planet to survive and begin to shape a viable future." "The principal strategy of the movement for globalization from below has been to identify the violation of generally held norms, demand that power actors conform to those norms, and threaten the bases of consent on which they depend if they fail to do so." To think that the State Department, General Electric, or the World Bank can be democratized is too foolish for words. What is not part of this picture is any thought of dismantling states, markets, or corporations and replacing them with authentically democratic social arrangements. (Thankfully, dismantling states, markets, and corporations is, however, in the picture for a significant minority of today's protesters against corporate globalization, although this doesn't seem to have been noticed by these authors.)

      This is a startlingly reformist book, and, as with most reformism, is deeply naive. The authors do not fully perceive or understand the true nature of the enemy we face. Having failed to take into consideration the imperatives of a system based on profit-taking, they fail to realize that many of the reforms they seek to impose are incompatible with that system, or that the system, in its current phase, is incapable of accommodating these reforms, without self-destructing, and that consequently, contemporary capitalists will fight these reforms, fanatically, because it is a matter of survival for them.

      These theorists of globalization from below however do not perceive this. They think these reforms can be imposed, through protests and the withdrawal of consent. This is where their use of mainstream sociological categories has gotten in the way. Although they use the term global capital occasionally, they are not really aware of capitalism as an historical system, but are rather merely talking abstractly about "established institutions" and "the power of the powerful". They claim that such power "is based on the active cooperation of some people and the consent and/or acquiescence of others." They believe that this power can be challenged by the withdrawal of consent. "Social movements can be understood as the collective withdrawal of consent to established institutions." This may be true on a very abstract level, and in the very long run (although apartheid South Africa survived for half a century after the vast majority hated it). But in the here and now, since they lack any concrete knowledge of what the actual imperatives of contemporary capitalists are (for their continued survival as capitalists), our theorists are led to make wildly romantic demands.

      Long lists of these demands are presented in Chapter 6: Draft of a Global Program. They want to "end global debt slavery", "invest in sustainable development", "reestablish national full employment policies", "end the despoiling of natural resources for export", "make corporations locally accountable", "end the domination of politics by big money", "democratize international trade and financial institutions", "establish local control of local environments", "make speculators pay for their losses", "establish a 'hot money' tax", "encourage development, not austerity", "make international environmental agreements enforceable", "make global markets work for developing economies", "transform the production and consumption patterns of wrongly developed countries", "establish a Global Economy Truth Commission", and on and on. All this is going to be accomplished by a global network of autonomous groupings and NGOs, working through existing governments, corporations, markets, and international financial institutions.

      I don't think so. An NGO Swarm can not reconstitute society. Nor can it nix capitalism, or even fix capitalism, which is really all it seems to be aiming for. Globalization from Below, as described by Brecher, Costello, and Smith, is a very badly flawed conceptualization of the struggle for liberation.

      9. The New Populism – Ralph Nader. (The Ralph Nader Reader, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2000, 441 pages.) Ralph Nader, a nationally known figure for the past several decades, has recently become the most well known advocate of the New Populism, especially since his presidential campaign in 2000. But there are other prominent voices: Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, Kevin Danaher and Media Benjamin (of Global Exchange), Lori Wallach (of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch), Gore Vidal, and many others. There is now also a twice monthly newspaper, out of Iowa, The Progressive Populist, which publishes columns by many of these activists. There are of course many other publications and writers. But I will take Nader as representative.

      There is hardly anything sweeter than listening to Ralph Nader bash corporations. It is so good to be hearing this again, after the long, stifling counter-revolution which settled like an ozone-alert smog over the country for a quarter of a century after 1968. (Jim Hightower's daily commentaries are a special delight too.) Nader has an exhaustive knowledge of American law, the Washington DC scene, and civil, labor, and consumer rights, as well as of the dirty tricks of American Corporations. He is also consumed with an inspiring moral passion. But sooner or later, in almost every speech, he will move on from listing the many crimes of corporate America to praising small farmers, mom and pop corner stores, and the small businesses of main street America. And then you realize of course that Nader is not against capitalism per se, but only against giant corporations and the control they have come to exercise over American life, including the Congress. That's why he keeps insisting that we have to build a new citizen's movement to recover our democracy, to get back to the democracy we used to have.

      Nader sees no problem with the US constitution or with the American Republic as it was originally founded. He just thinks that this has been stolen from us, and he wants us to seize it back from its usurpers. And so he ran for president, and joined the effort to build a new progressive party, to recapture control of Congress, and thereafter get money out of politics, reign in corporations and their lobbyists, protect labor and consumer rights, and in general enact the progressive agenda. And that is why he has recently launched, in August 2001 in Portland, Oregon, a Democracy Rising grassroots citizen initiative which he hopes will be able to accomplish all these things.

      But there are some fallacious beliefs at work here, among these new populists, including Nader. The most serious false idea is the belief that we can go back to small scale capitalism. We can never go back to small scale capitalism, and this populist desire to do so shows that populists don't understand how capitalism works. The ever increasing concentration of capital is an inherent feature of the system. The big fish eat the little fish. This dynamic stems from the endless, fierce competition among capitalists for markets and profits. It is not accidental, nor merely the result of bad judgement or corruption, that small scale capitalism gave way to monopoly capitalism. Capitalists had to move in that direction in order to survive, and for a system based on profit-taking to continue functioning. So this central plank of the New Populism is based on an illusion.

      A second fallacious idea is that we used to have a democracy but that it has been stolen from us, mainly by giant corporations. There was never a real democracy in the United States. It has been a capitalist society from day one. There has always been a ruling class here, starting with rich merchants in the north and the plantation owners in the south, who were later joined in mid nineteenth century by industrialists. Their control has never been seriously threatened, except for a few years during the American Revolution, when the lower classes surged into the arena briefly. The appearance of average people on the stage of history was quickly contained however, and ruling class control was solidified and stabilized in the US Constitution of 1787. So all this talk among populists about recovering our democracy is just another illusion.

      A third fallacious idea is that we can fix things by capturing control of Congress. But as I have argued elsewhere in this work, we can never get to a real democracy, that is to direct democracy, by capturing the government. A bourgeois, representative democracy, like the one existing in the United States, will never be able to transform itself into local, autonomous, direct democracies. In fact, the US Constitution was written precisely to prevent such direct democracies from emerging. So if our objective is to establish a real democracy, it makes no sense to build a progressive party to try to capture control of Congress. This is a third illusion afflicting New Populists.

      A fourth fallacious idea is that we can restore the welfare state. The vicious, worldwide, sustained, capitalist attack on public welfare, on everything public in fact, is not just because capitalists are evil and greedy (they are that it's true), but because this offensive has been necessitated by the need to maintain profit levels in order to keep the system of capital accumulation intact and functioning. Capitalists had no choice if they wanted to continue living off profit. (They do have a choice of course: they could stop living off profit, ditch free enterprise, and help change the world.) The populist belief that we can somehow restore public welfare, within a capitalist system, is another grand illusion. The Welfare State phase of capitalism is long gone. The only way we can achieve general well-being at this point is to get rid of capitalism completely and build a truly democratic world, one not based on wage-slavery and commodification.This is why, although I enjoy listening to Nader's rants as much as anyone, they are, for me, ultimately disappointing. I know that the reforms he wants are based on a serious mis-diagnosis of what ails us.

      10. Further Critiques. I had hoped to add quite a few more critiques to this section, but I must close it off. Perhaps I can continue this exercise elsewhere. I had wanted to include here a much stronger critique of the concept of civil society, using as a vehicle a review of Benjamin Barber’s A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong, and also perhaps, of John Keane’s Global Civil Society? I hope to write a separate essay on this later. For old-style conservative thought (not the current neo-conservative ideology, which is actually closer to fascism), a good book to critique is Robert Nisbet’s, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America; and for liberal thought, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Good Society: The Humane Agenda. I have issues with Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone) as a strategy for revolutionary anarchism. G. William Domhoff’s Changing the Powers That Be: How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win needs to be rebutted. Brian Martin’s Nonviolence versus Capitalism is a good book which develops many of the same themes that I have, although I cannot agree with his proposed ‘demarky’ as an alternative to capitalism and model for a new society. On the positive side, here are three excellent books that are pointing in the right direction: Takis Fotoupolos, Towards an Inclusive Democracy (1997), John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power (2002), and Ken Knabb, The Joy of Revolution (1997) (included in his Public Secrets). And so on.