Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century by Kevin Carson, 2021

Intro: On the whole, this is a typical Carson book. Like all my books since Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, it’s to a large extent a direct outgrowth of my earlier books insofar as it addresses in depth issues which I was limited to treating on only in passing in the previous books. In this case, Exodus applies the findings of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution regarding micromanufacturing technology and ephemeralization, and those concerning networked communications and stigmergic organization in The Desktop Regulatory State, to the questions of political organization entailed in post-capitalist transition (post-capitalism).

Table of Contents

Part One: Background

Chapter One: The Age of Mass and Maneuver

• I. A Conflict of Visions
• II. The Triumph of Mass in the Old Left
• III. The Assault on Working Class Agency
• IV. Workerism/Laborism

Chapter Two: Transition

• I. Drastic Reductions in Necessary Outlays for the Means of Production
• II. The Network Revolution and the Imploding Cost of Coordination
• III. The Impotence of Enforcement, and Superiority of Circumvention (Route-Around) to Resistance
• IV. Superior General Efficiency and Low Overhead
• V. Conclusion

Part Two. The Age of Exodus

Chapter Three: Horizontalism and Self-Activity Over Vanguard Institutions

• Introduction
• I. The New Left
• II. Autonomism
• III. The 1968 Movements and the Transition to Horizontalist Praxis
• IV. The Post-1994 Movements

Chapter Four: The Abandonment of Workerism

• I. The Limited Relevance of Proletarianism in the Mass Production Age
• II. Technology and the Declining Relevance of Proletarianism
• III The Abandonment of Proletarianism by the New Left
• IV. The Abandonment of Workerism in Praxis

Chapter Five: Evolutionary Transition Models

• Introduction and Note on Terminology
• I. Comparison to Previous Systemic Transitions
• II. The Nature of Post-Capitalist Transition

Chapter Six: Interstitial Development and Exodus over Insurrection

• Introduction
• I. The Split Within Autonomism
• II. The Shift From the Factory to Society as the Main Locus of Productivity
• III. Negri et al vs. the Commons (Antonio Negri)
• IV. Theoretical Implications

Chapter Seven: Interstitial Development: Practical Issues

• I. Post-1968 (-1994?) Movements
• II. Strategy

Chapter Eight: Interstitial Development: Engagement With the State

Part Three. Seeds beneath the Snow

Chapter Nine: The Commons Sector and the Theory of Municipalism

• Introduction
• I. The Growth of the Commons Sector As a Lifeline
• II. Municipalism: The City as Commons and Platform

Chapter Ten: Municipalism: Local Case Studies

• I. North America
• II. Europe

Chapter Eleven: Municipalism: Building Blocks

Chapter Twelve: The Global South and Federation

• I. Commons-Based Economies in the Global South
• II. Federation

Backmatter

Bibliography

About the Author

Partial Excerpts

2021

Preface

On the whole, this is a typical Carson book. Like all my books since Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, it’s to a large extent a direct outgrowth of my earlier books insofar as it addresses in depth issues which I was limited to treating on only in passing in the previous books. In this case, Exodus applies the findings of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution regarding micromanufacturing technology and ephemeralization, and those concerning networked communications and stigmergic organization in The Desktop Regulatory State, to the questions of political organization entailed in post-capitalist transition. Three of my research papers at Center for a Stateless Society were much more limited preliminary investigations into some of the same subject matter: “Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real,”1 “The Fulcrum of the Present Crisis,”2 and “Libertarian Municipalism.”

*Exodus applies the findings of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution regarding micromanufacturing technology and ephemeralization, and those concerning networked communications and stigmergic organization in The Desktop Regulatory State, to the questions of political organization entailed in post-capitalist transition

Like the previous books, it is a product of its time, in the sense that I was en-thusiastically immersed in the vital events of the day during the writing process.

As with Homebrew and Desktop, I was always two steps behind the news related to my research, and eventually had to draw a line

Part One: Background

1: The Age of Mass and Maneuver

I. A Conflict of Visions

I should note, at the outset, that in this section I deal with two dichotomies which are theoretically distinct, but tend to heavily overlap in practice. The first is between interstitial visions of change based on creating the building blocks of the future society within the present one, and insurrectionary or ruptural visions based on seizure or conquest of the state and other commanding institutions of the existing society. The second is between organizational forms modeled on prefiguring the future society, and organizational forms (defined mainly by mass, hierarchy and the central imposition of discipline) aimed primarily at the strategic requirements of seizing power.

in this section I deal with two dichotomies which are theoretically distinct, but tend to heavily overlap in practice.

The first is between interstitial visions of change based on creating the building blocks of the future society within the present one, and insurrectionary or ruptural visions based on seizure or conquest of the state and other commanding institutions of the existing society

The second is between organizational forms modeled on prefiguring the future society, and organizational forms (defined mainly by mass, hierarchy and the central imposition of discipline) aimed primarily at the strategic requirements of seizing power.

Following a struggle with the Bakuninists in the First International, the Marxists emerged as the dominant school of socialism—a school that was both insurrectionary and envisioned the seizure of state power as a tool for transformation

Marx and Engels from the beginning stressed that the transition to socialism was a thing to be carried out after the working class’s capture of the state, with the proletarian state playing a central role in carrying out the transition.

[In Marx’s] view the proletariat ‘is compel ed by the force of circumstances’ to use

[the state] in order to sweep away by force the old conditions of production, classes generally, and its own supremacy as a class. . . . On the other hand, reformists (e.g.Bernstein) rejected the idea of a political revolution since they thought the very economic process of capitalism led spontaneously towards socialism

As Marx and Engels themselves described it, “the first step in the revolution by the working class”

is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

As Marx and Engels themselves described it, “the first step in the revolution by the working class”

is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

they also envisioned a large-scale, centrally organized program of economic reconstruction including: 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State

History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time [ie. 1848] was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent, has really caused big industry for the first time to take root in France, Austria, Hungary, Poland and, recently, in Russia, while it has made Germany positively an industrial country of the first rank

3. Horizontalism and Self-Activity Over Vanguard Institutions

IV. The Post-1994 Movements

6: Interstitial Development and Exodus over Insurrection

If the New Left did not altogether abandon the ideas of insurrectionary assault and seizure of control of the preexisting institutions of state and corporation, it at least favored, far more than the Old Left, a concurrent interstitial approach of building counter-institutions as the nucleus of a future society

the Movement is a community of insurgents sharing the same radical values and identity, seeking an independent base of power wherever they are. It aims at a transformation of society led by the most excluded and “unqualified” people. Primarily, this means building institutions outside the established order which seek to become the genuine institutions of the total society.

practical” pressure points from which to launch reform in the conventional institutions while at the same time maintaining a separate base and pointing towards a new system. Ultimately, this movement might lead to a Continental Congress called by all the people who feel excluded from the higher circles of decision-making in the country.

And if this is only partly true of the New Left, it is much more fully true of subsequent phenomena like autonomism and the post-1994 horizontalist resistance movements.

Note on Terminology. The term “interstitial” overlaps somewhat in meaning with “prefigurative,” and the two words are often used more or less

For me “prefigurative” carries a whiff of idealistic lifestylism, whereas “interstitial” suggests actually building the new society here and now rather than just prefiguring it

The new municipalist movements today, to take a contrasting example, see community land trusts, alternative currencies, neighborhood gardens and workshops, etc., not just as “prefigurations” of the future society but as the actual beginnings of it: things that will grow and coalesce into the core of the postcapitalist system and eventually supplant capitalism.

I. The Split Within Autonomism

8: Interstitial Development: Engagement with the State

The primary tendency of leftist movements with interstitial development models has been to emphasize Exodus and the building of counter-institutions as a reaction, not only against seizing political power, but against engagement with the state in all its forms.

And this approach, as we have already noted, has largely characterized the post-1994 networked movements. David Graeber cited the “Buenos Aires strategy” from the Argentine meltdown as a model for Occupy

after the popular economic collapse in Argentina in 2001, a popular uprising that ousted three different governments in a matter of months settled into a strategy of creating alternative institutions based on the strategy of creating alternative institutions based on the principles of what they themselves called “horizontality

more and more people are being forced to reinvent their politics or reinvent their ideas about politics, both in terms of protests—but also I think in terms of creating alternatives

we are forced not only to think of creative forms of protest but also ways of how we actually survive and how we actually create alternative ways of living. .

what the crisis is also tel ing us is that that’ s the way to go, but that we haven’t gone far enough yet. We’re not yet in a situation where we can just tell capital to go to hell and survive without it. . . . But I think that’s the direction we have to go in.1

Holloway refers to that approach as “changing the world without taking power.” That means

to create, within the very society that is being rejected, spaces, moments, or areas of activity in which a different world is prefigured

how the different cracks that unravel the fabric of capitalism can recognize each other and connect

In the last twenty or thirty years we find a great many movements that claim something else: it is possible to emancipate human activity from alienated labor by opening up cracks where one is able to do things differently, to do something that seems useful, necessary, and worthwhile to us

If we’re not going to accept the annihilation of humanity . . . , then the only alternative is to think that our movements are the birth of another world. We have to keep building cracks and finding ways of recognizing them, strengthening them, expanding them, connecting them; seeking the confluence or, preferably, the commoning of the cracks

a precondition for the French Revolution was that, at a certain point, the social network of bourgeois relations no longer needed the aristocracy in order to exist. Likewise, we must work to reach a point where we can say “we don’t care if global capital isn’t investing in Spain, because we’ve built a mutual support network that’s strong enough to enable us to live with dignity.”

As Holloway observes in his analysis of the Zapatista rejection of state power, “The state, any state, is so bound into the web of global capitalist social relations that it has no option, whatever the composition of the government, but to promote the reproduction of those relations

Voting for the “lesser evil” is not necessarily “liberal” or “reformist”; rather, it is fully compatible with an interstitialist approach that sees the development of counter-institutions outside the state as the primary means of building the successor society. In this view, one votes the lesser evil—e.g., voting for an establishment Democrat against Trump—in order to stave off the worst of the immediate fascist threat and buy time, and to create breathing space for the primary project of building counter-institutions.

The purpose of electoral politics is not to build the successor society, but to create the least unfavorable background conditions for doing so.

9: The Commons Sector and the Theory of Municipalism

Throughout this book, we have made repeated references to the existence of a parallel commons-based economy alongside the capitalist one, the terminal crisis tendencies of capitalism, and the interstitial coalescence of the commons-based economy as a successor to the dying capitalist system.

this final section of the book has two general themes (both of which will be frequently referenced throughout, rather than being treated sequentially).

First, the actual building blocks of the post-capitalist society

We’re not simply adopting more decentralized production technologies or organizational forms, but coalescing all these building blocks into a fundamentally different economic paradigm

These new technologies and social forms by themselves would be of limited significance if we had no reason to expect their widespread adoption

This leads us to our second theme: the crisis conditions of capitalism as a system, and the crisis conditions of capitalism in everyday lives of ordinary people, intersect with the new liberatory possibilities of the new technologies and social forms to create a “perfect storm.”

II. Municipalism: The City as Commons and Platform

10: Municipalism: Local Case Studies

Transparency and Participatory Governance.

Jackson

Montréal

II. Europe

Barcelona and Other Spanish Cities

Beyond their local concerns and trans-local al iances, al the municipalist platforms have their eye on the transnational dimension in order to form a network of

“Rebel Cities”

Catalan Integral Cooperative

Ghent

Amsterdam

Local Case Studies: Frome

11: Municipalism: Building Blocks

Imagine a world where after being accused of using a counterfeit bil , George Floyd was approached by a community member who helped mediate the situation

Those in power would have us believe that such a world is impossible—but for the past four years, the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago has been providing a roadmap for what this radical reimagining of justice might look like. . . .

. . . Whenever there is a shooting, outreach workers arrive at the scene within 30 minutes to advocate against retaliation—and even when they insert themselves in potential y dangerous situations

Between 2016 and 2019, Austin had 47 percent fewer homicides and 45 percent fewer nonfatal shootings. After leading the city in homicides for over a decade, [the Austin neighborhood] had the sharpest reduction in violence in 2018.

Similar organizations have had positive results in other cities, including Philadelphia, Nashvil e, Oakland and Washington, D.C.

Tying it All Together. In this section we’ve seen a wide variety of municipal initiatives illustrating bits and pieces of a full-blown, commons-based municipal economy. But the different parts are seldom all seen together in the same place.

12: The Global South and Federation

*I. Commons-Based Economies in the Global South *