Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Past debts, future instalments


Over the past thirty years, ever since Maggie and Ronnie began privatising their republics, the developed nations have sunk into debt by spending increasing amounts of their future incomes. And the two trends are intimately linked. To favour private capital under the cover of an entrepreneurial ideology, a new paradigm was instituted of reducing wages and taxes. However, labour and government are the mass consumers of society, and all productive investments end up, sooner or later, as consumer supply. Instead of paying wages and taxes, capital was encouraged to increase production. And, when supply increased, consumers were encouraged to supplement their insufficient means by borrowing.

Investing incomes instead of consuming them tends to overproduction and crisis. This fatality can be avoided by exporting consumption and importing investments, and/or by granting unlimited consumer credit. The industrial nations had developed their economies by using the first procedure, but the growing production of the last decades was, to a large extent, built in new developing nations and this has inverted the exchange. The developed nations found themselves exporting investments and importing consumption, which is when debts began to expand. Individuals borrowed to compensate wage freezes, governments borrowed to compensate falling tax revenues and nations borrowed to compensate commercial deficits. For a while all went well, billionaires thrived and multiplied, millions of people passed from extreme to simple poverty, but borrowing is cyclical and, since short, medium and long pay-back dates have begun to coincide, a growing number of borrowers are on the edge of insolvency. Stepping back means drastic reductions in consumption with all their knock-on effects. Stepping forward is a jump into the unknown.

The cancellation of debts has a long history, going back at least to Solon in 6th century BC Athens. But such drastic measures have more often been replaced by monetary creation, rising wages and inflation. In the past, debt and its reduction were the concern of a nation with its particular monetary system. That financial autonomy disappeared when debts were outsourced as a means of restoring commercial balances. The first to do it was the US under the Nixon administration, shortly after revoking the Bretton Woods gold standard, and when oil imports were suddenly costing much more following the 1973 oil embargo by OPEC. It was agreed that the trade deficit on Arabian oil would be paid with Treasury bonds. It was an offer the Gulf protectorates could not refuse. This successful formula was later extended to include all commercial deficits, with Japan, Germany and China. The UK, a nation of bankers, turned to selling complex financial products, and may have invented the mortgage backed “security”. Inside the euro zone trade balances were maintained with Treasury paper from the start, Germany being the major creditor. As for Japan, a nation of savers, it has had a commercial surplus for the past fifty years, and holds all its national debts and a fair slice of American ones as well.

The industrial nations old and new (G7 + BRICS) have criss-crossed their debts and intertwined their production and trade to a high level of interdependence. But the US, primus inter pares in wealth and power, believes it can decide unilaterally the value of its currency. The trouble is that the US dollar is America’s currency and, at the same time, it is the global measure of value. Governments in Tokyo can do what they want with the yen, as it only affects Japan. Whereas the planetary impact of Federal Reserve decisions is similar to that of the European Central Bank on euro zone members. US dollars are not a shared currency, as they are rarely legal tender outside of the US, and yet exchanges everywhere are labelled in and paid with them, and all the world’s moneys are constantly compared to them. The Cold War was a confrontation for world dominion, and the dollar was a powerful tool for holding America’s imperial dominos. The events of 1991 and 2001 changed all that into a global coalition of governments against subversion. Instead of subverting each other, East and West are now confronting subversive elements in their midst. Yesterday’s enemies have formed an alliance to face a common menace. They no longer oppose each other and their Cold War weapons are obsolete. And the dollar is no exception.

The leader of the Western world cannot become world leader. America’s role in the 20th century cannot be globalised in the 21st. The world’s demography will not allow it. And so it is with the dollar’s dominion. And yet the global market cannot function properly without a universal standard of value. It needs to display prices that have a common scale of measure, as do volumes, weights, distances, etc. The dollar could fill this function when the US was producing half the planet’s manufactured wealth (1945), or a quarter (1980), but as the fraction gets smaller (a fifth in 2012) there must come a time when an alternative instrument is necessary, a real world currency that is not subjected to the particular policies of any one nation. Unfortunately, the multinational coordination needed for such a system is inconceivable in these times of intense economic competition and multiple military interventions.

Nations around the globe are recklessly spending their future revenues. This path to insolvency was taken by Argentina, Greece and others with fatal consequences. But they are small countries, and their tribulations are not considered reproducible in the major economies, least of all in the US. The trouble with ballooning debts is that they take over the economy. More and more income is being lent instead of being invested in production, and is paying interest instead of consumption. Instead of producing and consuming, an increasing amount of the nation’s wealth is dedicated to lending and usury. A trend that is obviously auto-destructive, though it is difficult to predict at what point the process will fail, not so much when the bonded masses rebel as when the wealth produced can no longer fuel it, when there is no more to increase lending and the paying of interest. That stage cannot be far off. It may in fact already be in place, and is being held off temporarily by quantitative easing. The dollar, the euro and the yen are probably already living on borrowed time, under the perfusion of monetary creations by their federal and central banks. Stopping those flows would be fatal. Maintaining them can only prolong the agony.

A small fraction of humanity receives most of the wealth produced. Being unable to spend it, it is lent out to the rest of society, to corporations, states and consumers. But, as corporations came to depend less on borrowing for their investments (less taxes, lower wages, more profits and cheaper more productive technology), the lenders relied increasingly on governments and households to fill the gap and circulate their excess wealth (1). Except that corporate debts are investments and they return their value, whereas government and household debts are consumed and their value must be produced again (2). The huge transfer of income, from labour and state to property, created an imbalance of supply and demand that was restored by debt. But, since the debt peak of 2008, that imbalance has become increasingly obvious and detrimental. As household borrowing and welfare began to fall back, consumer demand slumped and is still drifting in the doldrums with neither power nor direction. And, as long as the drain of wealth continues, there is no reason why that should change. It seems that the debt solution to domestic and international inequality has run its course, “and it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall ”.


1. Alan Nasser, in accordance with Keynes, sees the emergence of cheaper more productive technology as a historic trend.
2. A tentative analysis of this in a previous post.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Actions and Reactions


Contrary to plants that are often bisexual, in most of the animal world males compete with each other for female favours, though only a few species resort to violence. With possible exceptions, the violent species are those were one male has the exclusive usage of several females. For them the competition is not seductive, it is possessive. This is often the case for grass-eating herds. As for primates, some fight and some seduce, and evolving humans probably did the same. But, a long time ago, they branched out. Some followed and eventually domesticated the ovine, caprine, equine and bovine herds (also camels, llamas and reindeers), while others settled on river banks and deltas, fished and fowled, and cultivated ever more productive cereals, vegetables and fruits. Living different lives, the two branches developed different social structures and beliefs, according to the day to day experience of the particular environment they lived in.

The herds roamed the steppes and mountains in seasonal migrations, and human bands followed them. They saw the annual fights among males and learnt to kill them before adulthood, keeping and choosing a stud. They went on to killing their male cattle shortly after birth and milking the mothers. This mode of life led to a patrilineal society practicing polygamy and the symbolic death of young or new-born boys, though Abraham’s willingness and the powers of the Roman pater familias show that the symbolism was backed by reality.

The sedentary branch of humanity saw the river fauna, the plants they sowed and pruned, the birds, the bees and the passing seasons. The society that developed from this inspection can only be guessed at from legends and anachronistic surviving traditions. There are traces of matrilineage and the perpetuation of spring and autumn festivities, alongside the solstices of herd migrations. However, when the two branches met, when the migrants crossed the river, there were exchanges and then conquest. This occurred time and again throughout history, great invasions from the steppes of Europe, Asia and Arabia. And the herdsman culture imposed itself ever more firmly. At the dawn of civilisation, the two paths of the Neolithic revolution came together to form a syncretic society. But the nomads came again and again, by land and sea, and the other original element was obliterated.

Conquest brought an ethnic (transformed with time into a social) divide between master and servant, between possessor and dispossessed. It also imposed the transmission of heritage by the male lineage, though paternal certainty is always a tricky business. In the wilderness, camps were a family affair, and women were hidden when there were visitors. In towns and cities, they were closed in by walls, locked doors and barred windows. The new society deprived women of property and liberty. It took their inheritance and placed them under the tutelage of fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. It excluded them from social, political and economic activities. Having been made unable to produce (other than children), women became commercial objects. Some had a dotation others were sold. Conquest took the land, and those who lived on that land had to learn to toil for the conqueror. The new society was generated by violence and used it to perpetuate the double dominion, of the half over the whole and the few over the many. Of all the possible models, men were subjected to being bulls, rams, billygoats and stallions.

Dominion by violence needed more than a psychological disposition (sexual deprivation), it needed weapons and training. The maces and axes of polished stone and the obsidian blades that were still used in America at the time of the European conquest were superseded in the Old World by brass and bronze sometime in the third millennium BC. This was an elitist age. It depended on rare copper and zinc, and tin that is rarer still. Those who controlled the resources mastered the world, and the warrior clad and armed with shiny metal became the subject of legends. Then, towards the end of the second millennium BC, people began to forge iron. It was not as hard as bronze (steel came later) and it rusted, but the mineral was quite abundant and its geographical occurrences displaced power. Iron may not have been the only cause but, about the same time, there was a great upheaval around the Eastern Mediterranean. It was the end of the maritime empire of Mycenae, Argos and Cnossos, and pirate fleets roamed the seas as far as Egypt and Canaan.

Metallurgy transformed production with hoes, ploughs and all the cutting tools, and it changed warfare and social control. When war passed from quarrels over tribal territories to conquest and submission, fighting became à outrance and the occasional prisoner was executed in a ceremonial manner. (The Aztec soldiers, at the summit of Stone Age civilisation, were intent on taking captives for their ritual sacrifices.) However, the metallurgists had such an advantage over those who did not master the new technologies that the death of prisoners was commuted to life bondage for them and their descendants. This superior power could force their enemies to produce and reproduce for their benefit. To the first division between the ruling military class and civil society was added a second one between citizen and slave, and the three tiers system of social control was instituted. In Rome, the antagonisms opposing patricians and plebeians were forgotten whenever there were servile rebellions.

During the original duality of dominion, the ruling minority was permanently up in arms in direct confrontation. The introduction of slave labour promoted a middle class that had to choose sides. As slaves were usually foreign and serfs were very uncouth, the middle sided with power for a few thousand years. This was facilitated by demography, as the middle lived in towns while slaves and serfs tilled and mined the countryside. The change seems to have coincided with and resulted from the plague that ravaged Europe in the 14th century. It struck at all levels of society and, in fifty years reduced the population by as much as a third. Part of the land became a wilderness that could be reclaimed and the depleted towns were in dire need of labour. The serfs began to move and the structures of feudal bondage fell down. And there were the first signs of a new alliance with John Wycliffe’s Lollards, Walter Tyler’s peasants or Etienne Marcel’s Jacquerie. The next step would be the Reformation.

The ruling class controls the forces of coercion, but it needs an intermediary class to supervise and administer labour. Force is very hierarchical, with a top down chain of command and obedience as its highest value. Production and trade cannot function like that. They only thrive when there is constant invention and perpetual change. When production is essentially working the land for food, clothing and shelter, force is sufficient to take a share of wealth. When production diversifies and trade develops, force must be moderated for fear of disrupting the commercials flows. Habits die hard, however, and there was a long bitter struggle for Reform and Renaissance. The wealth of trade and industry competed with the wealth of land, and claimed a share of power. The economic and military opposition turned into an ideological one, and civil wars broke out across Western Europe. It was mostly an urban rebellion and only achieved some success in commercial cities, in places such as Florence, London, Geneva and Amsterdam. Elsewhere it was severely crushed and historic time was brought almost to a standstill.

The clash between the proprietors of land and the masters of trade and industry was an opportunity for the state to assume the role of arbiter. Monarchs acquired absolute power – in England the resistance came from parliament and the City of London, in France from a coalition of provincial nobles and in Spain from no one in particular – but it was just the beginning of a long process of state building, of a centralised administration that balanced the different and often conflicting interests of land, trade and industry. However, to stand above the mêlée of property, states were obliged to play a double role, first as demagogues leaning on the strength of labour, then as protector of property against labour’s expectations. And the personal frailty of absolute monarchs was pushed aside by the mass organisation of the total state. This was inaugurated by a Lord Protector (Oliver Cromwell), then came Emperors (Napoleon and Louis Bonaparte) and an Iron Chancellor (Otto von Bismarck), and all the Duces, Caudillos, Fuhrers, Rais, Little Fathers and Great Helmsmen of the 20th century. The rise of the state paralleled the rise of labour as a political force. The demagogues had encouraged the working classes to flex their muscles and show their vitality, but all that had followed was repressive ultra-violence and restoration. In an attempt to overcome this fatal historic recurrence, the 18th and 19th centuries produced two competing theoretical paths. One considered that private property of the means of production was the primary villain, that the state was the coercive instrument for expropriation and would wither away once communal property was established. The other considered that the state was the primary villain, that private property of the means of production would fade away once its coercive instrument was destroyed.

Utopian societies have been a philosophic subject at least since Plato. Rousseau’s social contract was a product of Enlightenment and was followed by the contemporaneous group of Fichte, Hegel, Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier. The first two were educated by state institutions and became university professors. The third ran a Scottish textile factory. The fourth was the destitute descendant of a duke. And the last was the bankrupted son of a wealthy merchant. All of which seems to have influenced their ideas. Owen, the most practical, crossed the Atlantic to try a real life experiment at New Harmony (Indiana). And Fourier’s phalanstery was applied as a “familistery” by Godin, an industrial ironfounder. However, it was the next generation who would begin to integrate in their thinking the new age of machines and industrial capital, and to highlight a diverging attitude towards the state.

The Napoleonic wars had so decimated Europe’s male population that, by the 1840s, those born after outnumbered those born before. Youth felt the strength of numbers and the opportunity for change. In Berlin, Young Hegelians were discussing liberalism and atheism (Marx and Engels would go their own way, as would Stirner). In Paris, Proudhon was criticising property, and Blanqui was conspiring. Mazzini and Garibaldi had fled Rome, and London was colonising Australia with and without chains. The “Springtime of the Peoples” in 1848 saw popular uprisings sweep across Europe. They were severely repressed in Ireland, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Italy, and only managed a foothold in Paris and Berlin. Two brief republics and many lives lost, but a demonstration of the people’s overwhelming power and the reaction’s unrestrained violence. It focused attention on the coercive forces of the state and accentuated the division of revolutionary ideas and practice, with communists insisting on the necessity of a state apparatus to oppose the reaction of money and property, and anarchists in favour of its immediate overthrow.

Alongside their studies of history, ethnology and economics, Marx and Engels tried to understand how their prediction of a classless society could actually be realised. They had gone public with the Communist Manifesto – the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains – in January 1848, just before the February Revolution in Paris, when the French people rose up to overthrow their king for the third and last time, sparking off similar movements in Europe and Latin America. And, when the reactionary guns had restored order, they were very critical of the bourgeois politicians who had handed the power won by the people back the forces of reaction. Revolutions succumbed because they were unprepared for the violence and did not have the power to oppose it. So the two exiled friends could only recommend a worker’s dictatorship “to wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state” (1).

For Proudhon social change was a bottom up process starting with workers’ associations, not a top down one after a change of government. Exchanging a bourgeois monarch for a bourgeois republic was not to his taste. But he was solicited and was elected to the National Assembly where he remained through the bloody repressions of April and June 1848, and on to the election of Louis Bonaparte as president in December. Neither Proudhon nor Stirner were revolutionaries. They believed in a society of associated free individuals that would have no need of repressive government structures. “The producer is the negation of the governor, organisation is not compatible with authority”. (2) “Government presents itself as the absolute, necessary, sine qua non condition for order. This is why it always aspires, behind all its masks, to absolutism. Because, according to the principle, the stronger the government, the closer order gets to perfection. These two notions, government and order, would hence have a relation to one another of cause and effect: the cause being government and order the effect. (…) But (…) following the logical classification of ideas, the relationship between government and order is not of cause to effect, it is that of particular to general. (…) In other words, there are several ways of considering order.” (3) “To all socialists anarchy means this: the aim of the proletarian movement – that is to say the abolition of social classes – once achieved, the power of the state, which now serves only to keep the vast majority of producers under the yoke of a small minority of exploiters, will vanish, and the functions of government become purely administrative. But to the Alliance it means something different. It designates anarchy in the ranks of the proletariat as the infallible means of destroying the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. It is therefore demanding that the International replace its organisation with anarchy – just at a time when the old world is in any case trying to destroy it.” (5)

Bakunin left the Russian army and moved to Berlin in 1841, where he frequented the circle of Young Hegelians. In 1848, he arrived in Paris a few days after the republic was proclaimed. The following year, he participated in the Dresden revolt, was arrested, condemned to death and sent back to Russia, where he was imprisoned and then exiled to Siberia. He managed to escape in 1961 and went to London. In 1864, he was back in Paris visiting Proudhon, who was living the last months of his life. Stirner had died in 1856 so, after Proudhon’s death in 1865, Bakunin became the main proselytiser of anarchist ideals. The reaction to the 1848 revolutions had crushed the social movements in continental Europe under the reigns of Léopold, Francis-Joseph, William, Alexander II, Napoleon III & Co. Except for Switzerland, England and the US, where “liberal” governments were slightly more tolerant, the socialists were forced underground. The movement stayed alive, however, and the International Working Men’s Association based in London, after the publicity of its second congress (1867), began to unite labour everywhere. Bakunin joined the Geneva section in 1868 and from there built his own secret organisation. It was the beginning of his tussle with Marx, and of the long running battle between party communism and communist anarchism. “The Marxians maintain that only a dictatorship, theirs of course, can bring freedom to the people; to which we reply that no dictatorship can have a finality other than that of lasting as long as possible, (…) Having taken possession of the state, he (the proletariat) should, according to us, destroy it immediately, as the eternal prison of the proletarian masses; however, according to Mr Marx’s theory, the people should not only not destroy the state, but they should on the contrary strengthen it, make it even more powerful and, in that form, leave it at the disposition of their benefactors, of their tutors and educators, in a word, at the disposition of Mr Marx and his friends.” (4)

The last two decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th were a period of intense imperial activity, when the great African interior was carved up by the major European powers. Diplomatically resolved confrontations only occurred in Sudan and Morocco, so that all the soldiers and guns were used exclusively against the local populations. President Monroe’s prohibition of European interventions in the Americas brought war with Spain and the military occupation of Cuba and the Philippines. Meanwhile, in the industrial centres of Europe and America, labour continued its struggle by organising national and international associations. The rift between state and anti-state partisans widened. And, within the pro-state camp, the social democrats, who believed parliamentary democracy could bring about social change, opposed the revolutionary socialists, who believed that a worker’s dictatorship would be necessary. Kautsky confronted Lenin in a battle of ideas. These quarrels over strategy did not stop labour from acting independently, and the multiple actions decided by the actors favoured the principles of anarchy. Kropotkin and Malatesta added substance to the concept, and anarcho-syndicalism developed, especially in Italy and Spain. There was also a rise in lone-wolf terrorism. As social tensions increased, social control was ever less effective. At the approach of August 1914, the tension was so high that putting labour in uniform and have it kill itself en masse was a satisfactory solution for governments and capitalist exploiters everywhere. And the ultimate violence of war overshadowed the ordinary violence of exploitation for four years.

The War was a general mobilisation of nations, and very few had the courage and convictions to resist. Those who did were executed, incarcerated or found refuge in neutral countries. Switzerland, at the heart of Europe, was the main sanctuary. Lenin had gone to Geneva in 1900 after his Siberian sojourn. He went back there in 1907 and did a lot of reading and writing. The “dress rehearsal” of 1905 had shown the lack of a practical plan. Theory had to become practice. Prepared in Switzerland, written in Finland and published in Russia in 1918, State and Revolution attacked Kautsky and the parliamentary socialists, and surveyed Marx’s arguments for a proletarian dictatorship of factory workers, farm labourers and soldiers. Following which, “Under socialism much of “primitive” democracy will inevitably be revived, since, for the first time in the history of civilised society the mass of population will rise to taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon (sic) become accustomed to no one governing.” (6) In April 1917 Trotsky and Volin were in New York, and Trotsky had this to say: “Like us you are revolutionaries. Like you we are anarchists, in the long run. Except that you want to install your anarchism straight away, without transition or preparation. Whereas we, the Marxists, we do not believe it is possible to “jump” by one leap into the libertarian kingdom. We foresee a transitory period during which the ground for an anarchist society will be cleared and grubbed by using political power that is anti-bourgeois: the proletarian dictatorship exercised by the proletarian party in power.”(7) And, in June 1918, Makhno met Lenin in Moscow. Lenin accused the anarchists of dividing the proletarian forces and opening the way for the counter-revolution. Makhno denied it hotly and Lenin concluded: “I meant to say that anarchists lack mass organisations, do not have the capacity to organise the proletariat and the poor peasants and, as a consequence, to rise them up in defence, in the wide sense of the term, of what we have all conquered and is so dear to us.”(8)

The corruptive effects of power are clearly visible everywhere, throughout history. But the coercive power of might is just as obvious. To defeat the forces that maintain the hierarchy of wealth, even greater forces are required. The mercenary state’s organisation must be confronted by an organisation with the power to overthrow it. In 1871, the Paris insurgents were backed by the National Guard and failed. In 1917, the St Petersburg insurgents were backed by the soldiers’ soviets and succeeded. The National Guard was just a civilian militia, but the French army had been badly mauled by the Prussians in 1970, which gave a brief advantage to the Commune. The soldiers’ soviets were already running the Russian navy and most of the army. They were beginning their fourth year of butchery on the Eastern Front and were quite accustomed to the use of force. The soldiers’ soviets were the force that insured the insurgency’s success. The October revolution ousted a puppet government and gave power to the Bolsheviks. The difficult part was constraining the provinces and their foreign support. And the process has a closer resemblance to the French bourgeois revolution of 1789 than to the worker’s commune of 1871. As for the consequences, one can only imagine what France and Europe would be to-day, if First Consul Bonaparte had decided on a policy of “republic in only one country” instead of world conquest.

The power of a centralised state machine has to be in place before it can be dismantled. Its strength is its centralisation, which results in a concentration of power and wealth. The societies that emerge, when the bonds of feudalism are broken, are strong and expansive. They are nationalistic because that is the only social bond they have to cement their hierarchal dominion. And they are continually at war against interior and exterior enemies who threaten the nation’s existence. Nationalism transcends all distinctions, rich and poor, native and immigrant, pale and dark, everyone can be brought to feel an aggressive attachment to the place where they live and work. The centralised states build nations by uniformising geographical space and its inhabitants. It is a difficult and usually violent standardisation of customs and language, always in opposition to the rest of the world. This question of what and who belongs to a particular nation has been very destructive and continues to be so in places where the question is still unresolved, and those nations that have settled their borders and citizenship are facing the turmoil of global migrations.

The Paris commune failed because it did not control military power and its urban militia could not defeat a professional army. This situation has repeated itself since, one thinks of Allende’s popular government in Chile and, much more recently, Morsi’s Moslem alliance in Egypt. In 1929, that is after the Spartacist uprising, the Kronstadt rebellion and Makhno’s defeat, Berkman had placed the question of a forceful revolution in a modern context.
How do you imagine a revolution could be fought in these days of armoured tanks, poison gas and military planes? Do you believe that the unarmed masses and their barricades could withstand high-power artillery and bombs thrown upon them from flying machines? Could labour fight the military forces of government and capital?
It’s ridiculous on the face of it, isn’t it? And no less ridiculous is the suggestion that the workers should form their own regiments, “shock troops”, or a “red front”, as the Communist parties advise you to do. Will such proletarian bodies ever be able to stand up against the trained armies of the government and the private troops of capital? Will they have the least chance?
Such a proposition needs only to be stated to be seen in all its impossible folly. It would simply mean sending thousands of workers to a certain death.
It is time to have done with this obsolete idea of revolution. Nowadays governments and capital are too well organised in a military way for the workers ever to be able to cope with them. It would be criminal to attempt it, insanity even to think of it.
The strength of labour is not in the field of battle. It is the shop, in the mine and factory. There lies the power that no army in the world can defeat, no human agency conquer.” (9)
But ideas die hard and, a few years later, Emma Goldman who should have known better was encouraging the CNT-FAI to fight in Spain. And since then the legend of armed rebellion has persisted in movements such as the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, Direct action, the Tupamaros, et cetera, and more recently with the vast constellation of organisations that have close or distant links to Al Q. Labour cannot overthrow the coercive power of the state, and controlling it an illusion. However, labour can, and potentially does, control the production and consumption of wealth, and armies have always marched “on their stomachs”.

Up until now, communications have been naturally centralised. The paper press, radio and TV function centre outwards. Ideas, information and organisations were obliged to adopt the same pattern. The web is destroying this form of diffusion, and is replacing it with transversal contacts and lateral thinking. The associates have always been beaten by the dictators, because the technology diffused ideas, goods and services from the centre to the periphery. The military model of command coincided with the means of communication, one orders many obey, one writes many read, one speaks many listen and see. A very ancient order is being made obsolete by the inter-network where all exchange with all in a global agora. Information technology is revolutionising human societies as it takes the place of all the previous channels used to shape ideas and provoke actions. The controllers are fighting back, trying to regain the hold they had over education, publishing and the air waves, but the genie is out of the bottle and his transformative powers are a disruption of history. Writing produced the graffiti and printing the pamphlet, but social media and the blogosphere have the unprecedented global potential to break central control of ideas and commands. There remains the hard core of constraint and property, of defence and security agencies, and of land, money and machines.

The last quarter century has seen capital investment multiply very fast, but the subprime debacle was the first sign of a production bubble, where supply had outstripped solvent demand. The resulting recession is concentrating property into fewer hands, as the big fish swallow the smaller fry. It is also impacting state budgets. The state justifies itself as a purveyor of social order for property and of social protection for labour. Austerity reduces its capacity to fulfil this double task. And, as its first fealty is to property, it cuts back on social protection and increases social coercion. Reduced revenues and huge interest-paying debts are forcing even the demagogues to show their real colours. The state is property’s tool for maintaining order, with the soft power of welfare and the naked power of guns. As funds are cut, the lost power of the first is taken up by the second, as the carrot gets smaller the stick beats harder to compensate. Usually, up until now, this has been the road to ultra-violence and military/police regimes. And it was possible because the constraining forces were set apart from the rest of society, by uniforms, barracks, a professional use of weapons with the license to kill, and an esprit de corps, a sense of belonging along with the reinforced propensity to obey orders. In Alice Miller’s words, “When someone turns up who speaks and acts like his father, even an adult forgets his democratic rights and stops applying them, he submits to this person, applauds him, lets himself be manipulated by him, grants him full confidence, finally giving himself completely up to him without realising the bondage he has fallen into, because one does not notice things that are a continuation of one’s own childhood.” (10) The coercive forces are formed in academies that exalt competitive elitism. They learn the strategies and tactics of violence, how to apply it and how to defend against it, just as others might learn to build bridges or grow potatoes. These armed forces are an essential part of the state structure. They give it the power to constrain at home and abroad. Without them, the state is reduced to an administrative body and, being unable to enforce them, loses its judiciary and legislative prerogatives. With them, the state is unassailable. They cannot be countered by fire power but they can be subverted by ideas, and their world is no longer hermetically set aside by walls and sentries, as the Hertzian messages pass over them unseen.

Property is nothing without labour to make it fructify, just as the state is nothing without foot-soldiers to pull the triggers. And the collusion between property and state can be countered by the association of labour with the foot-soldiers of security. State and property have a common interest in maintaining their extreme hierarchies. But the hands that wield the tools and the guns have just as strong an interest in reducing those structures to a common weal, so that wealth and force serve the many, not a privileged few.


1. Manifesto of the Communist Party
Political Writings 1, page 86, Verso 2010
2. Idée Générale de la Révolution au XIXème siècle
Anthologie de l’Anarchisme, tome I, page 94, la Découverte 1999
3. Ibidem, page 96
4. “Marxian” was the term used by Bakunin at the time.
Ibidem, pages 242 & 243
5. The alleged splits in the International
Political Writings 3, page 314, Verso 2010
6. State and Revolution, chapter VI, section 3
7. The Unknown Revolution, unpublished “conclusion”
Anthologie de l’Anarchisme, tome II, page 145
8. The Russian Revolution in Ukraine
Ibidem, page 176
9. The ABC of Communist Anarchism, page 229, Red and Black Publishers
10. C’est pour ton bien (For your own good), chapter VI, page 95, Aubier 1984