If you wish to skip straight to my political-economic analysis, start at Part Four. If you can tolerate a little cultural critique as an intellectual appetizer, then start at the beginning.
Part One: Knowing the Future
Contrary to what common sense would dictate, it is not impossible to foretell the future. It is not even particularly difficult to do so with any degree of accuracy, or at least verisimilitude. Indeed, the danger might in fact be the exact opposite, that one can be so caught up in a given sense of the future that any sense of moderation or appropriateness is lost. It is at this point that the narrative loses its measured utility, and starts to control its narrator. We may recognize this tendency even in the neoliberal sense of Futurelessness, which after all is just the present extended indefinitely. It is the enclosure of the imagination, the impossibility of seeing beyond the given idea of the future, that truly marks our present cultural impasse.
Let me wind this story back a little. In recent months, I have felt myself becoming afflicted by the curse of prophecy, increasingly feeling like a kind of communist Cassandra. I have cultivated a specific vision of our near future which has grown all the more irrevocable as I have sought to detail it further. The danger here is one of pretense; however true my present predictions may prove to be, it would be more than useless to lord this fact over others, as if prophecy itself is any kind of virtue. No, what matters about any given idea of the future is how it recontextualizes our present existence, how it shapes and affects it. From this point of view, it does not even matter too much as to whether the vision is ‘real’. Prophecy is either a warning, a desire, or some other motivational impulse. Its role is representation is relatively minor when compared to that.
Thus for the potential and danger of prophecy, both of them caught up in the motivational force behind one’s propheteering. Once this inherent power is made apparent, there is but one way to temper it. If you don’t want to be controlled by the unexamined Future, then you must learn to set its parameters, to see the future as a set of outcomes guided by specific conditions. In this way, it becomes a space of possibility rather than an all-determining Fate. It also provides a degree of falsifiability: if you present the conditions under which your Future would be realized, then you’ve automatically allowed for its potential non-realization. This is how one guarantees the necessity of humility, which is all too important in allowing for productive, synthetic communication. For dialectics, in other words.
Part Two: Succeeding
Like many of my intellectual ilk, I had a great time these past few weeks watching the final episodes of HBO’s Succession. And, like many of its critics, I found it an astute representative of the zeitgeist, with its boardroom drama standing in for the larger social impasses of the present moment. As the failchildren of the Roy family neared their tragic and inevitable conclusions, there was a clear sense that this show could go on no longer. Not only had the narrative completed its thesis—that Capital in this late stage is rule by committee, and only suffers the willful as long as they can do no real damage—but it had also come up against the precipice of the present time, the moment at which uncertainty becomes absolute. With the election of a more outwardly fascist president, and the surrender of legacy media to tech-based accelerationism, there was no telling what the future of this world (or indeed our own) would hold. In short, the show was arrested by its own developments, by a sense of Futurelessness which extends beyond the text.
In some of my earlier pieces, I have already spoken of this profound precarity, one which distinguishes the past few years from the earlier mode of simple Capitalist Realism. Where the latter ignorance was expressed as a form of pride (“There is no alternative! Hurray!”), what we now face is almost its precise inverse, a desperate longing for knowledge beyond the veil, even when the knowledge-seeking system itself precludes that (“There is no alternative! Oh no!”).
Capitalist culture cannot see beyond itself, yet still realizes that the end is nigh. In this, it is eerily similar to an existential fear of death, which is a more human measure of absolutely unknowability. More importantly, this hunger for possibility might help to explain the recent proliferation of multiverse stories, where a billion variations on the known are brought in as a final example of cultural excess. Perhaps, among these infinite realities, a better alternative may be located? But this belies the fact that even infinities can be bounded, conditioned by that which they regard as invariable. Thus, this mode of imagination comes up short as well.
Part Three: Peripheral Visions
But there is hope. The self-enclosure of capitalist culture is always already incomplete. In their drive to analyze the culture industry, the critical theorists of old had an unfortunate tendency to treat their object of study as an absolute force, rather than one complex system among many. The present modulation of the old neoliberal refrain into a more desperate tune can itself be taken as a sign of that. It is not Capital which wishes to see beyond itself, but those who have to suffer its consequences. The ignorance of the capitalist system is a pure one, bereft of any sentiment; the resulting cultural anxiety is an eminently human response.
It is from this notion of incompleteness that we can begin to see our way to a cultural alternative. As I have noted in some of my other pieces, there are plenty of actually existing imaginations of a post-capitalist future, one where the global social order has actively changed rather than passively regressed. The problem is that popular culture is naturally insulated against such visions, even as there seems to be plenty of demand for it. Thus, we find a never-ending stable of failed or corrupted revolutionary causes, who represent the possibility of difference, only to be foiled at the last moment. Should it be any surprise that the reactionary tendencies of superhero fiction are enjoying their time in the sun? Their brand represents creativity without consequence, color without texture. While every crumb of possibility is savored, the main course cannot be anything but pablum.
Yet at the periphery of our cultural networks, something different is going on. In such varied and colloquial forms as fan fictions, game modifications, and interactive online narratives, people are far more willing and able to resort to a post-capitalist radicalism. In some forums, it even seems to be the norm. It matters little here that these works and their authors are inherently marginal in nature. Not only do novel ideas often emerge from the margins, but the simple existence of a cultural vanguard destroys our original impasse. Instead of an absolute ignorance, we are merely dealing with a problem of communication, of networking. This is a far more practical question, and means that there are actual, positive steps to be made.
Part Four: Noble Truths
In what has preceded, I have sought to argue that the desperate Futurelessness of our present mass culture represents a logical inversion of the previous age of endless neoliberal futurity. Where change was once thought impossible, now it is seen as both inevitable and unimaginable. This failure of our collective imagination comes down to a supreme capitalist narcissism, an ideological ouroboros which cannot acknowledge any outside context. Thus it continues to eat its own tale, unaware of the way that it is in fact consuming itself. Were the proverbial snake able to see itself as part of a larger environment, then perhaps it could enact the kind of transformations that would necessary for it to survive. But alas, this ignorance of its own limits is part of the creature’s primordial condition. In its mind, there is nothing beyond it. So it is with the imaginary of late capitalism.
In what is come, I shall set out the beginnings of my solution to this lack of futurity, if not to late capitalism in general. These problems are in a sense mutually entailing: you can’t organize an alternative to late capitalism without imagining it, and it’s no use imagining alternatives to capitalism if they don’t inspire our movement against it. To overcome these entwined problems, I will work to establish a wider context of history, political economy, and revolutionary organization. As I well attempt to show in many different ways, our present global society is neither ‘normal’ nor ‘universal’. In truth, it is just one political-economic configuration among many. Or to put it another way: this too shall pass.
To give some structure to my discourse, I will make use of the tried-and-true Buddhist model of the Four Noble Truths. If this seems like a somewhat eccentric choice, consider that it gives a very minimal account of how systemic analyses generally proceed: there is a problem, that problem has certain causes, there is a solution, and there’s a way to that solution. It is this basic template that I mean to project onto the problem at hand. So, here goes!
There is a Problem
This is the simplest part of the equation, and pretty much amounts to what I’ve been signaling so far. A general cultural malaise has been precipitated by a deeper uncertainty about the future of capitalism, amounting to the perennially voiced idea that we are living in its latter stages. In the absence of any obvious alternative, this uncertainty can only morph into anxiety, the fear that things will either continue to be as shitty as they are, or else that they’ll worsen until a state of total collapse. Even this collapse cannot be entirely entertained, though, beyond a regressive repetition of half-remembered histories. It is in the latter category that we find such frontier fantasies as the post-apocalyptic genre, where Man ekes out a meager existence in the war of all against all. Considered historically, such imaginations are mere myth, with no basis in how societies actually tend to fall apart.
If we take a step back from this immediate and totalizing cultural panic, we will quickly realize that the real crisis of late capitalism is of a complex and interconnected kind, not one that can be distilled to the simplistic idea of ‘civilizational collapse’. Instead, we find a set of overlapping issues, some more contingent than others. Even a term like ‘climate crisis’ is inadequate here, as it threatens to obscure the way that something like Peak Oil presents a technically different problem from that of global warming, let alone topsoil degradation. And even beyond all this, there is the sense that capitalism as such does not ‘work’ any longer, regardless of whether it’s running up against its ecological limits.
Taken together, we are dealing with a severe entanglement of different societal mechanisms, each headed for its own particular crisis point. To confront them all at once is as absurd as it is inevitable, as the violation of any external logics is an essential part of the capitalist accumulation process. Indeed, if there is a unifying factor among all these various dysfunctions, then it is this tendency towards violation. As the complexities of the world are rendered down into discrete units of exchange, it is inevitable that the irreducible systems which underlie our society and ecology are stressed, if not broken altogether. By progressively destroying the grounds of its own existence, Capitalism prepares the way for its own annihilation.
With all this in mind, it is clear that a term like ‘late stage capitalism’ is not just plausible, but necessary. The question is not whether capitalism will destroy itself, but when it will do so, and what exact crises will precipitate that momentous occasion. For these reasons, we must now consider the real historical conditions which are setting contemporary capitalism on the path to ruination. What signifies its coming end?
The Problem has a Cause
As we begin to take this notion of ‘late-stage capitalism’ seriously, we necessarily enter into a process of historical contextualization. After all, the notion of a late stage implies the existence of earlier stages, as well as a mode of production that is evidently post-capitalist. It is through struggling with this changing nature of historical capitalism that we can also come to a deeper appreciation of what this term signifies to begin with.
In considering how the social institutions which constitute capitalism come into existence, and how their intertwining dynamics shift and morph in the process of capitalist development, we learn what parts of it we would consider most essential. Great terms like wage labor, private property, and commodity production derive from such a historically informed practice. It also leads us to an understanding how capitalist development proceeds as a system. For instance, we might focus on the Marxian Law of Value, the idea that the value of a given commodity in the process of capitalist exchange will roughly correspond to the amount of labor which is socially necessary to produce it.
Or else, we can turn our eyes to the relations between various groups of capitalists, and the nations or power blocs they align themselves with. This then leads us to a consideration of capitalist imperialism and geopolitics, the way the structure of exploitation in one country may enable that of another, and how the paternalistic dichotomy of developed versus developing nations derives from this interaction.
Finally, we should not forget the all-governing principle of capitalist accumulation, that which compels its limitless growth imperative. It is in the basic perpetuum mobile of interest-bearing debt, or else the growth-obsessed knowledge apparatus of mainstream econometrics, that we find Capital’s most dangerous and self-destructive tendency.
To acknowledge this inherent death drive, this eternal extraction which can only lead to a sudden stop, we must begin by formally separating it from the ‘regular’ cycle of speculation and crisis. While certainly related to the general need for growth, any business cycle which waxes and wanes might almost be mistaken for a natural process, and seems like the inevitable form of any uncertain process of development. No, what we must learn to do instead is to see the major crises of capitalist history as material, as relating to the concrete conditions of their historical context. In other words, these breakdowns happened because there was specific shit going on, shit that was far more threatening than your usual speculative bubble.
This brings me back to those principles of capitalist dynamics, how this system develops over time. From the aforementioned Law of Value, Marx derived a curious and paradoxical intuition: that the more productive capitalism becomes, the harder it will be for capitalists themselves to profit. This is because less and less labor needs to be involved to produce a given quant of commodities; since living, breathing labor is ultimately the only thing that truly needs to be compensated, it is also the only ‘excuse’ for capitalists to ask a given price and extract a given percentage from that. If you take all this to its logical conclusion, then capitalism’s primary crisis is one of overproduction rather than absolute scarcity, with its economy facing an unceasing Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall—the so-called TRPF thesis. While this tendency can be delayed or offset, it will eventually come do. And then the system as such is in trouble.
Now, even if you don’t buy into the specific TRPF thesis, it helps us to get at the general notion of a crisis in profitability, in the opportunity for fruitful accumulation. This is the key to understanding the potential end of capitalism as such. While a revolution may be considered the mode of institutional change, and is theoretically possible without an accordant crisis of Capital, it is the profitability of the latter which has kept our total social system upright until now. Money makes the world go round, as they say, and it sure buys you a lot of guns (as well as gun factories, cops, politicians, etc.). When the steady flow of money is suddenly arrested, so is the necessary maintenance of its administration and enforcement. Revolution then becomes a whole lot likelier, if not necessary altogether.
Of course, if capitalism really prepares its own collapse, then we should be able to identify the underlying mechanism. The TRPF option is one of them; absolute resource scarcity is another. From a larger perspective, it could be that the rate or degree of potential technological innovation will fall short of what one needs to keep accumulating; the glorious future of space capitalism may simply prove to be an implausible fantasy. Lastly, there is also an explanation based on the necessary disciplining of labor. Here, it is supposed that advanced consumer economies eventually end up creating a populace that neither needs nor wants to work, and that in order to keep them doing so, a whole range of entitlement limits and bullshit modes of employment must be conjured up, to the extent that the authorities responsible can only begin to decline in the face of such shortsightedness. Personally, I favor some version of all of these explanations. The great irony to me is that they’re happening all at once.
Taken together, I arrive at a kind of ecological or cybernetic reading of the unsustainability of capitalism. In this, I would emphasize the way that it is marked by immanent externalities. In other words, it is A system which constantly and inevitably disrupts the foundations of its own existence, be they social or material. Since it can neither control nor replace these underlying systems, it must content itself with either finding new places and people to abuse, or else accepting its own stagnation and decline. Naturally, the latter option has never been tried.
There is a Solution
Now that we understand why capitalism may be entering its latter stages, we can begin to extrapolate these causes towards their potential conclusion: a world beyond capitalism. In this context, it doesn’t matter much what we take to be our earlier ‘problem’. Whether it’s the cultural despair generated by late capitalism, or else late capitalism as a whole, any imagination of a post-capitalist world should take care of both. That said, we should be careful to realize that a post-capitalist society is not necessarily an anti-capitalist one, at least not in the liberatory sense of that term. As I have pointed out in some of my previous pieces, the concept simply signifies whatever socio-economic configuration will succeed this one. That does not need to be a better one!
Indeed, when considering the simpler paths to a technically post-capitalist paradigm, we tend to end up with a society that is considerably worse than the present ones. I would group these under a category of ‘devolved’ or ‘decayed’ capitalisms. (Terms like corporatism or techno-feudalism would also suffice, though these are a little more specific in their description.) Basically, these are economies which still evince many of the core institutions of capitalism: wage labor, commodity production, private property, and so on. Nevertheless, they lack that singular engine of prosperity which marks the capitalist epos: accumulation.
Without any opportunities for material growth, the production of production, there is no way for Capital to make good on its own debts and speculations. These must therefore take an increasingly imaginary form, serving more as a way to claim the right to rent extraction than as an indication of real economic prospects. The result is an economy marked by ‘involution’, a negative-sum process where the stagnation of one must mean the loss of another. The decline may be slow at first, the theoretical ‘end of capitalism’ not even being apparent at the time. In time, though, its degeneration will be undeniable, even if the ruling institutions will do their utmost to paper this over. In the end, their illusions of growth will prove utterly unconvincing.
If the above sounds rather speculative, that’s only because it is. In truth, I cannot predict precisely what form a ‘capitalism without growth’ would take. I only know that it is inevitable, given the basic ecological constraints to any economic order. The only way to ward it off would be to induce another industrial revolution, something which could add the same metabolic ‘boost’ to the system as that achieved by coal, oil, and (on a more limited scale) nuclear fuel rods. While some put their hopes in fusion, I’m not that optimistic. To me, it seems obvious that this century will demand the end of capitalism, for both normative and systemic reasons. This end can only be delayed, and not for much longer.
To illustrate this notion of a ‘too late’ capitalism a little further, there are two interesting, if imperfect examples I would appeal to. Both of them derive from contemporary works of online science fiction, and so are already involved with the political economy of the day. The first of these is the so-called “First World Empire” from Matthew Turner’s Not Quite Good Enough. While only described as part of this setting’s distant backstory, the image painted is nevertheless quite evocative. To make a long story short, the First World Empire is a near-future hegemony cobbled together by the financial and rentier classes. Having captured the global economic and cultural apparatuses, they are content to let the system run on autopilot, slowly smothering the world through rent extraction and chronic disinvestment. Though opportunities for growth technically still exist here, there is no need for the elite to take them.
The second example, meanwhile, is the ‘cosmoliberal’ economy depicted in For The Tyrants Fear Your Might, a cyberpunk setting I have talked about before. At first, this setting would seem to conform with the general cyberpunk template, as a handful of megacorporate ‘charters’ have oligopolized the entire interstellar economy. Fairly quickly, however, it become apparent that this far-future capitalism is not as healthy as it initially appears to be. The key revelation here is that this is a setting where both matter replication and biological immortality are trivial technologies, thus obviating one of the core excuses for capital accumulation itself: the prosperity of the masses. The fact that there is still a proletariat to exploit comes down to absurd degrees of IP gatekeeping, the formation of a corporate caste society, and the application of enormous amounts of state violence. While industrial capital still has a role to play, it is clear that this political economy is primarily built on financial speculation and rent extraction, and that growth itself plays a secondary role to the coercive maintenance of this increasingly ridiculous property regime.
Taken together, we can see that these two settings share certain interesting features, such as the terminal decline of the importance of industrial capital. More tellingly, though, I find it fascinating that both of them feature the natural outcome of flagrant real estate speculation. In these worlds, there are entire neighborhoods and holiday resorts which have been built for no reason other than to exist as an investment property. Their emptiness is precisely the point; were they to be occupied, to be used, their value in speculation would actually have to be realized somehow. That is a risk which these fundamentally fictitious economies simply cannot afford.
Though they are far from perfect representations of the kind of political economy I mean to be driving at—for one thing, they place far too much faith in the potential of a space-based economy—I’m still thrilled to see some of my own speculations reflected in these works. With time, as the existing tendencies of late capitalism become more and more apparent, we might see a lot more of them. I will certainly try to add to them myself. Though that would also be cheating.
Now, let us leave this considerable digression behind us, and return to the question at hand: what will a world beyond capitalism be like? Though my earlier examples have already illustrated the negative case, it would be a shame if this were all that could be said about our socio-economic prospects. I certainly would not consider it a ‘solution’ to the question of late capitalism. Thus, we are left with the responsibility of crafting a positive alternative from this impending trash fire. Hey, if it were easy, they would have done it long ago.
To begin with, I think it’s important to state the obvious: any positive conception of a post-capitalist future must involve the mass reorganization of our economic rights and responsibilities. To put it another way, you have to solve the entwined problems of production, reproduction, and allocation, i.e. how things are made, maintained, and distributed. From an ideal standpoint, this isn’t too much of an issue; we could simply rely on the old communist motto of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’. Of course, it is in developing the particulars of such an ethos that the real trouble emerges. Personally, though, I still think an initial utopian position is indispensable. Without it, one can easily get caught up in the myopia of the present, piling on assumption about what is ultimately possible. By orienting ourselves towards the ideal, or even the impossible, we at least maintain the right direction, even if we end up falling short of our destination.
With this in mind, let us take the communist principle of free distribution as our lodestone, and see how far we can get within the present circumstances. For starters, it seems obvious that a sufficiently liberatory economy must be one without growth, at least in a compulsory sense. The capitalist drive towards material accumulation has produced a world where almost every ecological limit to global throughput has been broken many times over. The question isn’t if this system could enter a terminal crisis, but rather when it will do so. Thankfully, a lot of literature already exists on what a potential ‘degrowth’ economy would look like, and which metrics it would prioritize instead of the existing ones. Thus, if we are to have anarchy and communism, then they must be degrowth through and through.
Degrowth Communism can’t be the whole of our answer, though, as any social order can become authoritarian if imposed from above. We should therefore supplement our economic picture with a political one, considering the means by which these operating principles are enacted and amended. In this, I would resort to the perennial answer by actual on-the-ground revolutionaries, as their self-activity represents both a liberatory orientation, and a concern for what is immediately viable. This answer consists broadly of self-organization, ways in which the toiling create new governing organs out of their own activity and coordination. In practice, this means such institutions as mutual aid societies, worker’s militias, and instantly recallable factory and municipal councils. Of course, these are just a few examples of a far wider spectrum of revolutionary actions. Nevertheless, their historical recurrence is notable, and seems to reflect the simplicity and inherent conviviality of such configurations.
With all this said, we should not be under any illusions regarding the initial strength of our proposed solution. Despite their condensed timeframe, revolutions actually take a lot of time to work out, and their institutional innovations often don’t come to full fruition until a few revolutions later. If any of this proposed program is to be realized, it will be at the end of a long and grueling process of political contestation, a situation of ‘dual power’ in which our fledgling social structures struggle to survive in the face of State and Capital. To succeed in this struggle, we must insulate ourselves against the inherent socialization of state power and capitalist exchange. While such forces cannot be eluded, we shouldn’t be so naïve as to assume that the right intention is enough to resist them. Those who wield state power or participate in moneyed exchange are always already being shaped by these hegemonic sets of social relations. They are never simply tools to be used.
With this in mind, the anchors of our solution will be found in our insistence on a different sociality, and the progressive expansion of whatever new norms this requires. In a Degrowth Communist context, we would likely stress those social norms which have to do with work, property, and profit. Other, intertwining struggles will have their own specific impacts. But if we can develop and maintain people’s autonomy, their power to arrange society in a free and convivial fashion, then the scope of our liberation may as well be considered infinite.
The Way to the Solution
Here we come to the hardest part of the equation: supposing that the previously established solution is viable, how do we get there? Again, whether we’re trying to resolve the late capitalist sense of Futurelessness, or to destroy the system entirely, the organization towards a revolutionary future takes care of both. That said, it is not enough to simply call for “revolution!” and leave it at that, for this would belie the complexity of the revolutionary process. Thus, I would begin our path to a solution with a study of what revolution actually means.
As noted before, revolutionary history is not one of easy victories or straightforward trajectories. What makes them important is not that they effect some essential break with everything that’s come before, but rather that they represent the ambiguous transition between two very different social orders. The call for revolution is in this sense an acknowledgement of incompleteness, of the sense that the ruling system has not yet enclosed every political possibility. While many historical civilizations considered themselves to be the final society, having realized the most perfect and inviolable form of government, they each were obsoleted through conquest, revolution, or the simple attritions of time. Change seems to be the only constant, along with the desire to create a lasting societal harmony. To truly realize the latter, then, I believe it must reconcile itself with the former. A free society is a sustainable society, and vice-versa, and we should therefore bend to the evolutionary pressure of revolution rather than futilely resisting it.
Having resolved to embrace and include the forces of social change—to the extent that they create more free and sustainable conditions, of course—we are left with a question: what makes revolution so good in particular? The answer to this is simple. Though revolutions are often if not always paired with mass social crises like wars and famines, they also represent a lacuna of political authority, where the intricate kyriarchy which ordinarily seems unassailable is quickly falling into ruin. In its absence, a potent emptiness becomes evident. This emptiness is what reveals the incomplete and compromised nature of the earlier hegemony, as various ideas and movements which were once thought minor or marginal suddenly come to the fore. While these can consist of either liberatory or kyriarchal forces, only the former is properly revolutionary, as it alone values the process that brought it into being. Where reactionary forces seek to restrict or recuperate the social flourishing of these empty periods, full of pluralistic, self-organization, revolutionaries embrace it. They know implicitly that we owe the liberatory impact of a given revolution to the extent that its emptiness was allowed to sustain itself. Thus, just as we should embrace the force of revolution, so should we treasure and preserve the emptiness which represents its positive potential.
I admit that all of this is getting rather theoretical now. My basic point is that under revolutionary circumstances, the form and content of our kind of movement is profoundly unified: we emerge ‘spontaneously’, and then seek to preserve that spontaneity. This, to me, is the way to lasting success, to a permanent revolution if you will. The real challenge is bringing it about.
Here is where we come to the more practical questions of organizing a revolutionary cause. Even if every real revolution is frustratingly unique, we can still derive some basic principles from the conception of revolution I’ve laid out here. In the last section, we already encountered two examples of revolutionary strategy: the notion of dual power, where new social institutions fight for power and legitimacy against the existing ones, and the suggestion that we should maximally realize liberatory social norms in the here and now (this latter concept is properly known as ‘prefiguration’). These two ideas are easily synthesized into a larger sense of how revolutionary movements are organized and developed. The general insight which results from this is that revolutions are the product of subcultural histories, of hidden or repressed trends in the social fabric which burst forth in times of precarity. From this point of view, one could conclude that the next major revolution is always already being made, the creation of both conscious and unwitting revolutionaries in the present time. Thus, instead of being some distant moment of salvation, akin to the totality of the apocalypse, we have instead a phenomenon which is immediately accessible, while also demanding a degree of care and cultivation to ensure a fruitful outcome.
It is in the above conception of revolution as catalyzed by counter-culture that we can gather some of our practical objectives. In terms of ‘what is to be done, I shall make no specific recommendations for now. This is mostly because my interest in philosophy and political economy leave me prone to more general statements about the course of revolutionary history. I would have to pick a particular time and place—like, say, the US ten years from now—before I could give any coherent advice about how to steer these situations in a more revolutionary direction. No, here I would like to confine myself to a universal impression of what our necessary actions will be like overall.
In this context, I can think of at least three interconnected concepts which describe some aspect of our potential revolutionary self-activity. These are education/socialization, space creation, and the avant-garde. In a way, they are all different ways of describing the same process, that of creating a new set of social relations within a still hegemonic state society.
The first of these three notions, education/socialization, focuses on the need to take up new ways of understanding of the world, and to enact the norms which result from that. We cannot expect to be anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, or whatever else we intend to be, without actually knowing what these systems of oppression entail, and how our daily practices reinforces them. This is a process of learning as much as unlearning, and one which must be actively incorporated into our lifeways to be properly assimilated. Its pedagogic method is utterly unlike the firm disciplining of erstwhile communist cadres; the goal is not to create some centralized proto-state, but rather to spread the right revolutionary skills and attitudes as widely as possible. Only by making our institutions into a wide and ineliminable part of the culture, can we ensure their mobilization of the masses in times of late capitalist crisis.
Here is where the notion of space creation comes in, as it represent the primary method of revolutionary socialization. In our ordinary lives under late capitalism, we are constantly socialized by the rules and norms of whatever spaces we must exist in to survive. Between the home, the store, the car, and the workplace, a great part of our lived existence consists of a constant onslaught of normalization and discipline. To break through this requires a spatiotemporal alternative, a moment or place where we can come to act differently, and teach ourselves to be different kinds of people. Creating this enclaves of an alternate sociality should be precisely our objective. These can take various different forms, and would likely be appended to more conventional organizations such as squats, labor unions, and social media platforms. By understanding these socializing functions as part of a greater revolutionary tradition, we avoid any suggestion of lifestylism, the idea that whatever spaces we establish represent the total scope of our liberation. Instead, they are but the beginning.
Finally, it is inescapable that in this process of progressive socialization, a certain section of the sympathetic classes will be more educated or organized than others. This is the aforementioned avant-garde. What matters is that we don’t let this distinction reify into a claim to internal rulership. The more advanced sections of a revolutionary class are not inherently more virtuous or correct simply because they are accustomed to the necessary practices. Instead of letting them enter positions of leadership by default, they should make up the forefront of the space-making effort, working to expand the capacities of others rather than flaunting their own. If one is to keep out grifters and opportunists from the revolutionary movement, this is the only meaning of ‘vanguardism’ one should countenance.
Taken together, we can think of all these methods and principles as being part of a strategy of meta-organization, i.e. the organization of organization. I emphasize them here, because they are the most versatile and potent elements of revolutionary history. Instead of trying to devise an exhaustive list of rules for any given situation—a strategy which will inevitably lead to false parallels and misapplied models—we should instead maintain a general but adaptable understanding of how revolutions proceed, and how various people and organizations might be arranged into a greater whole. Indeed, if the task of making revolution were to be defined by a single aptitude, I believe it would be this.
Conclusion
In surveying the grand analysis I have tried to set out here, I owe an immense debt of inspiration (if not plagiarism) to a whole host of scholars, scientists, and revolutionary theorists. When it comes to my account of revolutionary struggle in particular, I follow in the footsteps of classical anarchism, council communism, and the various student-workerist tendencies of the late 1960s. Here, I have tried to build on them in several distinct ways: front-loading a Marxist or social-ecological interpretation of late capitalist involution, filtering some of its own intuitions through my anti-essentialist Buddhist-Daoist framework, and pointing to the importance of (meta-)organization as an object of study.
That said, this will hardly be the end of my writing on political economy and revolutionary theory. I’ve written many pieces like this before, and I’m sure that many more will follow. In particular, I’m eager to look deeper into the history of 20th century state socialism, and whether it could have escaped its own tendencies towards statist and capitalist recuperation. Beyond that, I have another piece in the works about state and revolutionary capacity, and I’m always looking into the future of our political economy, focusing on the US and China specifically. By no means am I done with anything I’ve written here. If any of it has inspired or enlightened you, or if there are areas of my theoretical framework that you’d like me to write more about, please let me know. Even without the capitalist drive to overproduction, ideas are the one thing I have in spades.
The inner Moon 