The recent wreckage of a ship in the cost of Greece has cost over 700 human lives. For the policymakers, this has a positive connotation because it conveys a message to people wanting to immigrate to Europe: keep out!
The cycle in which liberalism comes out of the closet in the form of fascism is again maturing in Europe. The absence of anti-capitalist organised groups has played an enormous role in leaving the rows of people to liberal-fascist demagogy. The lack of empathy with the immigrants has a twofold dimension: the dehumanisation of the self and the other.
How is it possible that, as people die trying to cross to Europe, parties and political organisations celebrating their deaths and suffering are getting stronger?
My father used to say: whoever plants winds harvests tempests. In this sense, it is imperative that the contemporary left makes a self-critique.
The death of the anti-capitalist left is the product of a comprehensive strategy of the capitalist elites in which Marxist, socialist, and communist intelligentsia was infiltrated, scattered, divided, conquered, and substituted by the postmodern left. The goal of this new left was to paralyse any attempt to confront and change the capitalist system. It provided instead two sets of theories: first, an eschatological, nihilist framework in which capitalism was recognised as flawed, but simultaneously one had to see that there is no other alternative to it because all concrete socialist tentatives are imperfect; second, the destruction of objective reality in which common goals and pains are felt by us all in constant acts of recognitions, and in its place, a subjective, arbitrary, irrational worldview should become the criteria of the truth, translated in the reactionary notion of personal identity.
Irrespective of how successful this endeavour by the power elites was, it could only occur if the anti-capitalist left imploded. The power of anti-capitalism is embedded in two pillars: to have reality on its side – not subjective perceptions but objective reality – and to be the spokesperson, the translator, the mediator, the teacher and, at the same time, always the pupil of the working masses, of those who are dispossessed from the means of production, that is, the 99% of the people. Therefore, the anti-capitalist left must bear the foremost responsibility for its own disfranchisement.
Before the status quo hijacked social discourse and the hearts and minds of the people, the anti-capitalist left had already suffered a metamorphosis: it had now become the let’s-reform-capitalism left. This was not only a political but also a theoretical and methodological betrayal. Can there ever be a reformed and ethical slavery? Can there ever be a regulated and ethical rape? Of course not! They are ontological impossibilities. Nonetheless, when it comes to capitalist exploitation, in the eyes of the former anti-capitalist, the now reformist left, it could be rebranded. Leftist postmodern irrationalism declares: changing the name changes reality. Therefore, if capitalist exploitation is now painted with the colours of the concepts of liberal democracy, then – voila! – capitalism must have become democratic.
For the reformist left, the oxymoron of capitalist democracy (capitalism = social relations of production based on exploitation by the capitalist elite, and democracy = rule of the people) could simply be ignored. Now, the reformist left felt it became part of the club of the ruling elites; it had the illusion – as most of the so-called leftists have until today – that it could change the system from the inside, while in reality, it was the system that was changing the left.
Although neoliberalism and postmodernism are two sides of the same medallion, their existential condition was the capitulation of the anti-capitalist left. Meanwhile, its new task became to provide legitimation for the system both abroad and at home. Post-World War II has been virtually universally conceived in an anti-historical fashion. Not only the rise of fascism appeared as an anomaly, disconnected from its liberal ties, but also the so-called welfare system (or Keynesianism) was embraced acritically. It ignores its existence as a reaction to the Soviet Union’s welfare state. Moreover, without a socialist path going on, it is, in fact, a system of managing and controlling the (precarity of the) masses so that any emancipatory expectation never comes to fruition while the system is assimilated and protected by those same people being exploited.
And this connects with the second function of the Keynesian system, namely, to destroy any empathy towards the other, to reaffirm the values of capitalist egoism. While third-world countries were being plundered and those who fought against classical colonialism were demonised, capitalist welfare was sustained on the backbone of underdeveloped countries. And needless to say that despite the discourse against fascism (Hitler’s and Mussolini’s), after 1945, through the Paperclip and Gladio operations, Nazi-fascists were assimilated by the United States to enrich their scientific community and also to fight communism in Europe, respectively; meanwhile, the fascist regimes in Portugal, Spain, and Greece, on the one hand, and brutal military dictatorships in the American, African, and Asiatic continents, on the other, did not represent a problem for the liberal democracies as they were usually installed by them through coup d’états while removing the elected people.
The reformist left renders, therefore, war, plunder, destruction, and exploitation as reasonable enterprises when the West perpetrates against the rest of the world. Simultaneously, the power of the left, which was previously anchored on the people, faded; the people, conversely, lost representation because the reformists not only parroted the narratives of the status quo but distanced themselves from the masses with their irrational claims disconnected from the broad demands of the people in their daily lives.
This, in turn, resulted not only in the lack of representation of the people by the intelligentsia but even more importantly in the total de-politicisation of the masses, whose spiritual lives lost connection with each other, with their labour actives, with their communities, with those in need, with daily lives besides their own, in a word, with their humanity. While people were left by themselves as individuals belonging to the same class, the ruling class and the intelligentsia from virtually all spectrums proclaimed the inexistence of classes; “there is no such thing as society”, proclaimed M. Thatcher. Consequently, people were not only atomised at work by the capitalist class, their power as a class, which had existed until that moment, was declared extinct. Now, there was only economic, political, and social atomisation.
Since 2008, many people have started to claim to be anti-capitalist, to participate in the people’s struggles, to be progressives or even radicals. In practice, they are simply relativising postmodern nihilism and assimilating the old posture of the former reformist left. The practical result is the continuation of the disconnection between the real people and the leftists, who considered themselves bearers conveying the message of the people.
Ordinary people, being left to their own fates for the past 40 years, see their confidant representatives in the empty rhetoric of a more extreme wing of the ruling power. The message of the extreme right-wing shows a certain degree of empathy while at the same reaffirming and protecting egoist values, which have become the sole social bond among them after decades of neoliberalism.
Contemporary immigration from North Africa and the Middle East is the perfect example. After allowing the elites to destroy, invade, conquer, and pillage those regions, creating millions of refugees, the reformist left is suddenly surprised that the pain of those trying to seek a better life in Europe is not met with compassion. After decades of an ideology of dehumanisation of the other, of those barbarian terrorists, this left thinks the masses, negatively reacting, are to blame. The refugee crisis is a tragedy that the United States and Europe have objectively created while subjectively constructing an image of fairness, justice, superiority for themselves and inferiority, savagery, and backwardation for the other. Add to this the worsening of living conditions in Europe, especially since 2008, and a recipe for disaster is ready to be served.
History does not contain a destiny, and dark moments are merely transitory. However, if the self-proclaimed left continues on this path of reform and identities, it will only prolong its necessary destruction before a new movement can indeed represent the people; meanwhile, the suffering of both “locals” and immigrants will remain trapped within the logic of capitalist conflict. It is time for self-critique before new affirmative actions can be made.
We must be interested not only in the grand scale, systemic, and institutional changes that we so desperately need, but also in the human center of change that is both root and spark for lasting, fundamental transformation across society.
By uniting these two components of change, they become two sides of a leaf, at once the reflection and the reflected, the potential and the path.
20 theses and a thousand buts
For the last few months, I have been a co-organizer of a project for radical solidarity, a unifying framework of positive vision and strategy for social transformation. In other words, I have joined in the audacious pursuit of developing a culture that fosters collective, strategic action, aimed at building and sustaining a movement of movements.
The project is based on the essay20 Theses for Liberation, co-authored by 36 activists, co-hosted by ZNetwork, DiEM25, Cooperation Jackson, Academy of Democratic Modernity, MetaCPC, RealUtopia, and now co-signed by a growing list of individuals and organizations. It seeks to be a kickstarter for a wider convergence of perspectives, continually adapting, and a source of collective power for local and global applications.
Before I lose the realists, the seen-it-before’s, the good-luck-with-that’s, and the ain’t-got-time-for-this-shit’s, let me interrupt your “no, but…” for just a moment longer.
Yes, it’s utopian. And, it’s strategic.
I do not propose that the 20 Theses project is without fault, and that no negative or even dismissive reactions are warranted. Rather, I propose that much of the perceived problems and resistance to engagement with this project, and others like it, are reflective of a deeper ailment in liberatory struggle.
Using the 20 Theses project as it was intended, as a jumping off point for developing culture conducive to building collective power, reveals that perhaps the first steps forward must include a step back.
Prisoners of our own device
“The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
In a recent email to a fellow organizer, I admitted that my biggest impression from this project, so far, is that I am now even more solidly convinced that the left (and many people in general) are so well conditioned by our society to have a “no, but” reaction, rather than a “yes, and” reaction, to positive formulations.
We aim to see what’s missing, reject-able, or just doesn’t reflect our own personal situation, and we use that as a stopping point rather than as an invitation to listen, add, apply, share, contextualize, etc. We have a reflex to oppose rather than propose – and not because we’re all just narrow minded assholes but because, for a long time, opposition has been understood as our only power.
My comrade advised me to share this observation publicly, and after some thought, I agree. Why pretend this problem doesn’t exist when we can name it, confront it, and maybe overcome it?
What is the lesson and the way forward from this pervasive ‘no, but…’ syndrome? The answer might lie in the question – in order to knock down the walls we’ve thrown up, we have to remember that even though we were pressured and conditioned to build walls, we did in fact build them. And we can let them fall.
The frustrations suffered while initiating, growing, and sustaining solidarity and building collective power should give us all the more reason not to stop. This initial wall shows us how seriously we need such efforts to keep trying to connect, to open pathways for engagement. Behind each self-imprisoning wall are the cries of people who have nearly forgotten that we hold our own keys. In insolation, we will remain captive. In community, we are reminded that the power and potential of interdependence is greater than any wall.
Perhaps even this might sound wishful, vague, or even self-helpy. Again, I challenge your “no, but” with a YES, it has to do in part with collective and personal psychology and wellness, AND it can be strategically linked to systemic conditions. Within our problem lies an invitation: any ways in which to foster connectivity and a culture of ‘building up’ are urgently needed. We can’t expect to have any collective power or left unity without such a culture, let alone any appeal to wider groups or any skill at grassroots organizing.
An honest look within
“Without community, there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
– Audre Lorde
Refocusing on positive vision and strategy toward mutual aims does not imply that we abandon critique. Rather, it requires getting better at critique. Critique is one of those things where quantity can drown quality, washing away everything in its path.
Part of good critique is self-critique. I do not intend to steamroll the nuance out of millions of participants in diverse struggles. I highlight our “no, but” syndrome not to point a snide finger at “us” or “you”, but to confront some shared experiences honestly. I fully recognize that I am making generalizations, and I do so in an attempt to create space for an increased appetite for nuance. I recognize and celebrate examples that diverge from the problems I describe. They are not the exception that proves the rule, rather they are bastions of the true human spirit serving as guides if we will only follow their light.
Now for the self-flagellation…
It has become normalized to focus solely on what we reject or oppose. We are not habituated to linger over the possibilities between the constructive versus the deconstructive. The space between these two types of critique is where many potential choices lie, and it is highly self-defeating to squander such opportunities. Sometimes, deconstructing is beneficial, as in deconstructing gender binaries to reveal that the binary itself is a mere construct. This has significant liberating potential. However, without constructive critique, a feedback method that offers specific, actionable recommendations for change and improvement, this potential cannot be built upon. While good constructive critique certainly exists in gender justice and in other realms of struggle, it must often fight to be heard and to thrive over the din of demolition. This does no favors to the movement.
The effect renders us into solitary homing missiles for what we each want to destroy, yet we have little skill in the work of constructing, repairing, rebuilding, and including. Our landscape is littered with the burnout and rubble of our own movements while the ecocidal-racist-cis-heteronormative-ablist-patriarchal-imperial-colonial-capital-authoritarian-corporate-war machine takes our uncoordinated hits in stride and chugs along.
In searching for the roots of this phenomenon, we can certainly point to our confidence having taken a beating. It’s possible that “no, but” syndrome is caused by prolonged attacks on liberatory movements. Driven from a constructive focus to go underground, all that’s left is deconstructive activity leading, over time, to a culture dominated by deconstructive thought. Eventually, our identity itself is based on being deconstructive. We might wear “no, but…” on a T-shirt. The key is in recognizing that this is actually an individualistic perspective that limits our collectivism, and where we easily mistake extremism for radicalism.
The implications of this demolition-mode span all struggles. Deconstructive critique flourishes, and though important when holistic, careful, and nuanced, it is increasingly impotent as we have become so unskilled in seriously and collectively engaging with what we want to build and promote. It is the constructive component of critique that solves problems, that builds numbers and commitment, and that makes fundamental change happen.
Yet history is riddled with repression and suppression, and though our time is certainly troubled, we shouldn’t be tempted to place all the blame on the past, conveniently out of reach. We cannot erase decades of repression, but we can confront the lack of hope that it has promoted. It is the mentality that fundamentally changing society is either not possible, or not important, that must now be confronted and debunked through practice. Frequently, we don’t even know our own foundational values and norms clearly enough to be able to apply them to diverse contexts, and so we end up reflexively rejecting things that are actually examples of practice. It’s time to come back above ground, re-root in a broadly shared framework, and connect positive vision to examples of prefigurative practice, giving each other something real to point to and aim for.
It’s not me, its you
“Coalition-building is not easy. You don’t make a coalition because you like those in the coalition. You make a coalition because none of us are going to triumph alone.”
– Audre Lorde
Beyond transforming critique from bludgeon into wand, and perhaps more personal than reviving a commitment to elevate positive vision and strategy, there is another consistent pothole in the road to sustaining healthy, powerful communities of struggle. And very commonly, it’s not me, it’s you.
Can I be brutally honest? You fellow progressives and proponents of radical liberation can suck to be around and work with. Tell me you’ve never had this thought cross your mind? Anyone who regularly engages in meetings, forums, projects, etc can attest that we are often lacking even in skills for conversation and deliberation itself, regardless of topic. It’s draining.
Why is this? Are you actually awful, no fun, oversensitive, either totally lacking in confidence or possessing it in unjustified surplus, disconnected from reality, and generally ready to pounce on any perceived difference we might have in ideology or priorities? And am I just so enlightened, committed, and well-meaning that your failings couldn’t possibly also reflect on me?
Unlikely. There’s an obvious point here in that we are a group of people who all feel passionately about our activism, and so are predisposed to be extra sensitive and even volatile about that which we care for so deeply. Bunker mentality is real. It’s also true that we tend to feel most hurt and let down by those to whom we feel closest — it’s why you might feel less personally stung upon learning that Trump had committed sexual assault, than if a member of your coop made an unwanted sexual remark about a colleague’s appearance, even though Trump’s offense is more extreme. You’re not surprised by Trump but you’re disappointed and hurt by your coworker. The two offenses are also different in that your immediate power to directly oppose injustice is much more accessible the nearer the offense. All these personal dynamics play their parts.
However, there is something more going on – it’s not just you, it’s not just me, it’s us. The good thing about this fact is that we can address movement culture both personally and systemically, together.
To start, many if not most of us, have at some point been hurt deeply, even traumatized, which has led us to identify and become opponents of hegemonic systems of oppression. Joining in collective struggle is a valiant response to experiencing or witnessing suffering, but we must still recognize that we are largely a collection of misfit toys. The “successful, well-adjusted radical” mirage may occasionally present itself on TV or YouTube, but even our superstars have scars and even people who were born and raised into counter hegemonic perspectives still suffer under the same oppressive systems. However we got here, we are all “other” in relation to existing social norms by default of our resistance.
This can be both a blessing and curse depending on how our internal movement culture is developed. By striving to organize internally according to the values we seek for society, we are better able to unleash a full diversity of perspective, experience, thought, and practice, thereby enriching movements and empowering people. Through organizing, we have more than just the chance to analyze and critique the system. We have the chance to construct meaningful connections among people in extraordinary and impactful ways. Community is built more by means than ends. Without strong community, the ends are out of our hands.
In addition to organizing through liberatory practice, walking the rocky road of radicalization towards empowerment requires that instead of victimizing ourselves and each other, we must again let down our walls and practice regenerative, interdependent activism. To confuse adding our own suffering for alleviating the suffering of others is a recipe for burnout, and it is ineffective. If we oppress ourselves and each other inside while fighting oppression outside, only the masochists will remain. Our movements might not always be able to be “safe spaces” or fun spaces, but they should at least be regenerative spaces.
Just a taste of community and collective power inspires hope and determination. Why then is it so often ephemeral? We can call for interdependence and solidarity, but to work collectively takes trust, which takes time to build and is easily destroyed. Having the courage to believe in the possibility of change through collaborative efforts is foreign and enormously daunting for many people. It requires challenging the prevailing myths of our system, reshaping our habits and fears, and actively participating in collective endeavors. We will have to help each other in envisioning a world where mutual reliance is fostered, even if we don’t always agree or even always like each other. Overcoming the grand scale challenges we face will require a cultural shift towards believing in each other and believing that we can collectively create better alternatives.
Community #4Liberation
“Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. So, what is utopia for? That’s what it’s for, it’s for walking.”
– Eduardo Galeano
To inspire massively and seriously, when asked, “what do you want?”, we have to have an answer — not a rigid blueprint, but a framework. This is one goal of the 20 Theses project. It does not make the leap from broadly shared vision and strategic norms to any specific program or policy. Instead, it aims to establish a communal gathering place from which diverse applications of a shared framework can be self-determined by people in many places over various timeframes.
The second goal of this project is simply to suggest that by sharing some roots, we might build interdependence and trust between movements. The 20 Theses is a living foundation, able to guide and be guided, without overstepping or overprescribing. The original authors made it explicit that engagement, critique, and adaptations are encouraged — in fact, collective engagement itself is the purpose, developing a culture of solidarity that enables desperately needed strategic organizing.
I do not claim that we shouldn’t search the 20 Theses, or other proposals, for flaws or gaps. However, if that is our primary and final response to positive vision in general, we will not get anywhere. Instead, we must connect positive vision to today, to program and practice, each in our own ways and contexts. At the same time, we can identify immediate and medium-term struggle and let visionary frameworks guide strategy and program towards long-term goals in a positive, plausible arc.
Why does this simple logic for moving forward so often stall and fail? Perhaps we can’t just walk towards Utopia – it is not a place to which one can arrive alone. Perhaps, we must take a step back, hold hands, and dance.
Building community, coalitions, and power blocs, and attracting mass participation along the way, can only be done with a “yes, and” culture. It also requires a look within to overcome defeatism and cynicism, to relearn how to behave with each other, to offer positive pathways that inspire mass involvement over a fixation with purity of ourselves, our identity and aesthetic, and our movements. We need to promote new forms of desire and practices that offer meaningful self-determination towards fulfillment that are not tied to oppressive systems. A large part of this work will be to develop as a hopeful community, interlinked in deep solidarity via unifying frameworks, and relevant through collective action for what is strategically necessary to make changes today and tomorrow towards a more utopian future.
Co-Hosts & Co-Authors: ZNetwork, DiEM25, Cooperation Jackson, Academy of Democratic Modernity, MetaCPC, RealUtopia, Kali Akuno, Michael Albert, Renata Avila, Ramzy Baroud, Medea Benjamin, Peter Bohmer, Fintan Bradshaw, Jeremy Brecher, Urška Breznik, Noam Chomsky, Savvina Chowdhury, Devriş Çimen, Mark Evans, Andrej Grubačić, Jason Hickel, Kathy Kelly, Arash Kolahi, Bridget Meehan, Sotiris Mitralexis, Jason Myles, Cynthia Peters, John Pilger, Matic Primc, Don Rojas, Stephen Shalom, Alexandria Shaner, Norman Solomon, Cooper Sperling, Yanis Varoufakis, Brett Wilkins, Greg Wilpert
[The following is an edited transcript of the podcast RevolutionZ’s 230th episode. It is from RevolutionZ’s unscripted Ruminations series, but it is also about something I’m very familiar with because in this episode I discussed not all differences among all allies, but just some differences among some advocates of participatory economics. Regular listeners to RevolutionZ are familiar with the participatory economic vision but for others, while I here try to avoid assuming background knowledge, some of what appears below may be, well, unfamiliar.]
Participatory economics is a vision for a post-capitalist economy. It features a productive commons, workers and consumers self managing councils, jobs balanced for empowerment, equitable remuneration, and participatory planning. But beyond these core agreements, as of June 2023, what differences among themselves do participatory economy’s advocates have?
Differences About Jobs
Participatory economy’s advocates broadly that we should reject the division of labor not only typical in capitalism but also typical in what has been called twentieth century socialism. That familiar corporate division of labor gives about twenty percent of the workforce empowering tasks and the remaining eighty percent disempowering tasks. The empowered managers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc., who we call the coordinator class, control day-to-day operations because they monopolize the information, skills, and access necessary for decision making. In contrast, the disempowered assemblers, cleaners, drivers, etc., who we call the working class, do tasks that fragment and reduce rather than enhance their skills. Their daily activities separate them from the information and access essential for making decisions. The empowered coordinator class commands the disempowered working class.
To remove that coordinator/worker hierarchy, everybody in a good economy needs to be able and even eager to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. To achieve that prerequisite condition, each person in each workplace needs to do a job which has a comparable empowerment effect to all other jobs in that workplace. Participatory economy’s advocates agree that there won’t be only one right way for workplaces to arrange their balanced jobs. Different workplaces with different conditions, means, and preferences will likely adopt different procedures to arrive at their own balanced job complexes.
So what differences do advocates of balanced jobs have with one another? To balance within workplaces means everyone in each workplace has a job comparable in its empowerment effects to everyone else’s job in that workplace. But what if across workplaces there remain very large differences in empowerment?
For example, imagine that eighty percent of the workforce winds up in a subset of workplaces that have only highly disempowering tasks. And imagine twenty percent of the workforce winds up in workplaces that have only highly empowering tasks. In other words, what if an “empowerment hierarchy” doesn’t exist inside each workplace because everyone has a balanced job for their own workplace, but still exists in the economy as a whole, due to imbalances between workplaces? What if a fifth of employees are empowered and four fifths are disempowered because we’ve sequestered all the empowering work into some workplaces and all the disempowering work into others? We’d still have unbalanced jobs, but now between workplaces.
You might ask, “well, okay, but how could you possibly do that without screwing up the economy? Who would make decisions in workplaces with balanced jobs that are only disempowering? Such workplaces would have no one capable and inclined to make its needed decisions. Nothing would get done.”
Imagine you farm out a workplace’s empowering tasks. For example a vehicle workplace contracts with a managerial firm, an accounting firm, an engineering firm and others as needed to take care of decision making and managing the vehicle plant and other empowering tasks. No matter where you are in that restructured vehicle plant its balanced jobs are only disempowering. Imagine for another workplace, say a publishing house or accounting firm, you farm out the disempowering tasks. The editors and accountants remain, but you farm out the custodial, secretarial, and other disempowering tasks to disempowering firms. No matter where you are in the renovated publishing house, its balanced jobs are only highly empowering.
Some advocates of participatory economics feel that that scenario can lead to a class divided workforce despite having balanced jobs inside each workplace. Those advocates’ want to balance jobs not only in each workplace but also across workplaces. They feel that people in a highly empowered workplace would need to spend some time in a disempowering workplace. Similarly, they feel people in a disempowering workplace would have to spend some time elsewhere doing various tasks that are empowering.
The point is, if you think imbalances between workplaces would lead to a coordinator/worker class division, then despite its added complications, to achieve classlessness you will want to balance across as well as within workplaces. On the other hand, you might think that the hassle of having people work in more than one place will outweigh what you consider the negligible possibility of a class division emerging if you only balance within workplaces.
My own view is that I favor balancing across as well as within workplaces. I think that seeking to balance for empowerment only within workplaces would guarantee retention of a disempowered and an empowered sector of the workforce, and thus a class division.
Differences About Remuneration
Advocates of participatory economics reject providing income for property, power, or even output. They tend to agree, instead, that work should receive income for how long, how intensely, and under what conditions it produces socially valued output. They favor the ethical and incentive implications of this approach and call it equitable remuneration. Society wants us to work usefully and not just lolly gag around calling it work. It wants us to do needed socially onerous tasks. It wants us to work the duration that will produce the amount of output society collectively wants for consumption. In turn, duration, intensity, and onerousness are factors for which remuneration can impact what we do. But within each workplace, how do workers determine how to distribute the total income the workplace has available so that each worker receives an appropriate amount for the duration, intensity, and onerousness of their socially valued work? Once there is agreement about that as a norm, advocates understand that each workplace will collectively decide its own procedures which will undoubtedly differ somewhat from what other workplaces decide due to different circumstances and preferences in different workplaces.
In other words, inside each workplace there isn’t only one correct way to fulfill a norm such as remunerating for only duration, intensity, and onerousness. With that norm, the economy needs an overarching mechanism to decide that workplace A and workplace B are afforded an amount of income to disperse among their workforces that accords with each workplace’s overall duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued work. But then how closely and by what methods each workplace chooses to keep internal track of differences in duration, intensity, and onerousness of its member workers, and by what procedures each workplace then apportions its total allotted income will likely differ in different workplaces because of their different products, processes, and preferences. For example, I might prefer a workplace where the assessment of duration, intensity, and onerousness is relatively relaxed. You might prefer a workplace where that assessment is quite precise so that differences in income are more refined. I may think that getting high precision is not worth the time and effort that goes into it. I may want to work in a workplace, for example, where we choose to have an average income, an above average income 5% higher, a super income 10% higher, and then also an income 5% below average and another 10% below average. You may instead prefer to have many more gradations of as little as 2% or even 1%. In any case, the idea is that just as with balanced job complexes, there’s an overall aim or norm that’s agreed for all workplaces, and then features that are contextually different because different workplaces have different conditions and preferences.
But what non contextual remuneration difference exist among participatory economy’s advocates? It turns out that some advocates favor a completely different norm than remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness. Some people who in all other respects advocate participatory economics and who even like participatory remuneration vastly more than remuneration for property, power, or output would say, “wait a minute, there’s something still better than that.” And the thing that they would say Is better is the time-honored norm “from each according to ability to each according to need.” And while I think all advocates of participatory economics would agree that there’s something very nice about the intent of “from each according to ability to each according to need,” I think many advocates of equitable remuneration would add that taken as a literal guide for income “from each to each” has some very serious flaws. And while I’m not going to go through all those in full detail, the reasoning is relatively simple.
If you get what you say you need, why don’t you just say you need more and more and more? Why don’t you ask for everything that will make you more fulfilled, more satisfied with your circumstances, and more able to develop your abilities? If you like astronomy, why don’t you want a backyard observatory? If you like skating, why don’t you want a backyard ice skating rink? If you like travel, why not an endless trip around the world? The reason is “from each to each” assumes you want to be responsible and you know such requests would be greedy and irresponsible. Not everybody can have so much. But advocates of the duration, intensity, and onerousness norm wonder what will reveal to you what is too greedy and what is responsible.
With the “from each to each” norm in place, the economy will say to you, take what you need, but it won’t say, that much is too much, or, for that matter, that much is too little. And the same goes for work. How do you know how much is responsible to produce? You are in a workplace with 50 (or 500) co-workers. Why should you produce more or less? How long should you work? How hard should you work? Should you do the onerous things or just slough them off at the expense of output? You don’t know what is responsible. Suppose your ability would allow you to work 80 hours a week. In that case, should you work 80 hours a week just because that’s your ability? No, of course not. There is a societal amount to work that is responsible in light of the amount of desire there is in society for the outputs of production as compared to the desire there is in society for leisure time. There is a personal amount to work for you in light of your desire for income as compared to for leisure. But “from each to each” doesn’t reveal that total amount for society, nor does it tell me what my share of that total ought to be.
A second related problem is how does the economy know in what direction to make innovations? Where should we invest? Do we want to enlarge our capacity to make one item or some other item? Where is the feedback in this approach that distinguishes pursuing X and pursuing Y? The needs approach doesn’t tell us how much people want X as compared to how much people want Y, because to get what you need and you to give what you are capable of doesn’t reveal any gradation of needs or desires. It doesn’t tell us where we should invest to create new capacity.
As for myself, I like certain desires behind from “each according to ability to each according to need,” in particular, that the economy should collectively provide full income for those who are unable to work fully, and should likewise meet special needs for free medical care, day care, etc. In other words people shouldn’t get short changed, receiving less than they need due to not being able to work. Likewise, people shouldn’t get over worked, being pushed harder than they are able. The problem is the norm doesn’t provide information needed for desirable allocation. So while I think that we can positively fulfill the “from each to each” virtues by way of equitable remuneration, I also think we would seriously violate economic viability if to fulfill those virtues we opted for the “from each to each” norm.
Differences Regarding Allocation
The agreement regarding allocation among advocates of participatory economics is first off that we don’t want markets and we don’t want central planning because we feel that by what markets and central planning cause people to do and by the way they arrive at outcomes, both markets and central planning deny self-management and violate the ecology. More, like the corporate division of labor, they elevate an empowered coordinator class over a disempowered working class. How do they do these things? Well, that’s a much longer discussion, but let’s settle here on noting that there is that level of agreement among advocates of participatory economics.
The next step for such advocates is, okay, if we’re not going to have markets or central planning, what are we going to have? Pretty much every advocate of participatory economics agrees that we should have self managing workers and consumers councils develop, refine, and make decisions regarding work and consumption. But how?
Participatory economy’s advocates all want workers and consumers to cooperatively arrive at a plan regarding what’s produced and what’s consumed. They want the plan’s procedures to facilitate the accurate valuation of all items so allocation decisions properly reflect people’s true preferences regarding personal, social, and environmental effects. More, participatory economy’s advocates agree all of this will require a new mechanism, and that the mechanism advocates propose is called participatory planning. Workers’ councils make proposals. Consumers individually and as councils make proposals. The workers councils see what consumers have collectively proposed for consumption. The consumers councils see what producers have collectively proposed for production. There follows another round of proposals, where in each new round, or iteration, workers and consumers offer and respond to revised proposals. Iterations continue until there is an agreed plan. The prices of items evolve until they accurately represent the full personal, social, and ecological costs and benefits of the production and consumption of the items in question. Amounts offered by producers come into accord with amounts sought by consumers. But if that much is agreed, what differences exist?
First, as in the case of balanced job complexes and equitable remuneration, there are differences about additional contextually contingent features that will be incorporated in any real implementation participatory planning. So, for instance, one extra thing to incorporate is how to assess and handle the implications of environmental externalities. For example, a workplace that’s generating pollution needs to be charged for that so there’s a reason for it to either cut back its pollution because it’s doing damage that is worse than its benefits, or to continue with the pollution because the benefits outweigh the damage. To decide, we need a mechanism for ascertaining the correct valuation of the pollution. More, we also need such a measure so that the people who are hurt by the pollution can be properly compensated. Another element to add is how to determine investment. Society needs to set aside and then utilize a certain amount of its productive potential not for immediate consumption, but for the maintenance of the system and the development of new ways of operating in the future. Society might, for example, want to invest to reduce the amount of onerous labor, or to save certain resources, or to explore Mars. There are also details of the basic planning iterations themselves and of the communication of information during those iterations as well as of additional structures that economies may need to facilitate people getting new jobs, or changing where they live, and so on.
So what differences exist that aren’t about filling out the model with contingent details that may quite reasonably vary in different implementations? In the case of the division of labor, this is like settling on do we or don’t we balance across workplaces as compared to flexibly incorporating various instances of contingent details such as how each workplace approaches balancing their own jobs. And in the case of remuneration, it is like do we have as our norm equitable remuneration or do we have “from each according to ability and to each according to need,” as compared to how each workplace then contingently implements an agreed norm.
I think one such potentially important allocation difference is about “qualitative information.” To what extent should we incorporate mechanisms in participatory planning that allow for the communication of qualitative information as compared to communicating just information about degree of desires to consume or produce some item? To what extent should we have means for producers and consumers to access the actual characteristics of why consumers desire some output or not, and why workers want to produce some output or not?
In other words, do we want qualitative information from consumers and producers to not only enter into the determination of valuations by way of their collective impact on particular councils’ overall proposals, but to also be more specified, conveyed, and accessible to other councils? Advocates of participatory planning’s difference about this hinges on views of the relative benefits versus the relative costs of having more qualitative information available. To elicit, accumulate, and convey qualitative information would involve some time and steps. If you think that would introduce a considerable burden for little gain, you will oppose it. If you think that having the qualitative information available would introduce a considerable gain with little burden, then you will favor it.
My own view is that qualitative information is not endlessly important and should not be imposed when it isn’t needed, but that having mechanisms that gather qualitative information and that allow workers and consumers to choose to access it will enhance people’s capacity for empathy and solidarity, and also guard against prices deviating from what are really true social and ecological costs and benefits.
Differences Regarding Emphases
Next, what about differences regarding how advocates present the vision? When anyone presents an economic vision, or for that matter, a political, kinship, ecology or, say, more narrowly an education or sports vision, what do we want to convey? A difference regarding presenting the vision—and I think there are gradations of this among advocates of participatory economics—is whether you should present a full picture that is rich in its components of what you hope to attain so you try to provide answers to as many questions as you can come up with? Or should you present a kind of a core map or scaffold that leaves out contingent features? Should you present, that is, a detailed comprehensive map of all features or just a core map of only essential features?
While no advocate of participatory economics is at what we might call either extreme regarding what to present, some advocates provide more detail and deemphasize the extent to which much of what they present is contextually contingent. Other advocates emphasize the essential core elements but don’t go much into what they always make perfectly clear is contingent content. For the latter approach, the core or scaffold to which contingent features will necessarily be appended in future practice are the elements that are considered essential for the full economy to wind up with self-management, solidarity, diversity, equity, classlessness and ecological sanity. You present core features that are in your view essential to winding up where you aim, and you acknowledge that there are many more contingent aspects that will depend on future experiences and preferences. For example, inside each workplace, there are contingent details regarding how to arrive at balanced jobs so choices will often differ in different workplaces precisely because different workplaces have different attributes. The same holds for dispersing equitable income to each actor in different workplaces, and perhaps for exactly how much qualitative information is collected and made accessible during planning.
The point is that this type difference can yield different ways of talking about and presenting the vision. At the extremes, one might reach far into suggesting or implying that things are essential when they aren’t, or one might stick so closely to what is thought to be essential as to leave out texture needed to show that the vision really is worthy and viable. Of course, both these extremes should be avoided.
Another instance, I think, of a difference in presentation priorities, derives from the issue of class relations. To what degree do advocates highlight and explore the class hierarchy between disempowered workers and empowered coordinators versus noting that it exists but not overly addressing it? I am not sure this difference even exists, but it certainly could. Some advocates of participatory economics could think emphasis is needed so that immediate program and then final aims aren’t subverted by coordinator interests dominating choices. Other advocates might think deemphasis is needed to avoid unnecessarily polarizing tensions between coordinator class members and working class members when they could all mobilize against owners.
Another possible place where I think there may be differences in ways of presenting could arise from different views about how to talk about efficiency. So, first, what is efficiency? Efficiency is, I believe, accomplishing what you desire to accomplish without wasting things you value. So if you can do a task in way one, and you can do it in way two, and way one gets you the outcome that you seek and does it without wasting stuff that you value and way two gets you to the same outcome, but it wastes people’s time or wastes resources or wastes inputs, you will consider way one more efficient than way two.
It turns out, in others words, that being efficient has to do with stuff that you value as ends and as means. And what we value is in the eye of the beholder. For a capitalist, efficiency means making profits while reproducing the conditions of capitalist dominance without wasting anything that the capitalist values. But notice, capitalists don’t value other people’s wellbeing. They don’t value the ecology. If they get to their sought end of profit and they do it by cost cutting and by speed up or by dumping waste, they feel they are supremely efficient. But since we value the human wellbeing of the workforce and the environment around the workplace, (not to mention we don’t seek capitalist ends), we think they capitalist practices are grossly inefficient. Since we don’t value profits for owners, and we do value human wellbeing and development for workers and consumers, for us efficiency is very different than it is for capitalists. If all participatory economy advocates can agree on that, and I suspect we can all agree on that, then what is the difference we might have regarding how we talk about efficiency?
I think the difference here is that some advocates of participatory economics might say that using the word efficiency and thinking about it in terms of time, energy, and getting things done well and quickly is enough. You don’t have to clarify for every situation what is valued and what is sought to make clear how your approach is humanly and not capitalistically efficient. People just understand. Other advocates might say no, people don’t automatically understand. The word efficient is so warped by the fact that now it is based on what owners seek and value, that in people’s minds, the use of the word only implies getting tasks done more quickly with less waste of inputs. Well, what if getting tasks done more quickly imposes hardship upon the people doing the tasks? In that case, it might not be more efficient to get the same output by reducing the time spent. Or what if in a good economy we have a workplace that produces vehicles and we ask what does it mean to be efficient at producing vehicles? If the answer someone offers is to produce them with as little time spent as possible or with as little effort expended as possible, in fact that may or may not be efficient. What if producing it with less time spent is accomplished by incorporating methods which are dangerous or which simply reduce the fulfillment of workers on the job? What if reducing effort involves increasing pollution? The point is, we desire efficiency in the sense of accomplishing human fulfillment and development without wasting things that we value.
In this case, I think the difference among participatory economy’s advocates is operational. I don’t think we disagree about whether or not we want to be efficient. To not want to be efficient is to not want to attain our sought ends, which is sort of ridiculous. Or it is to want to attain sought ends in a manner that costs more in terms of things we value than it has to. And that also is sort of ridiculous. So we want to be efficient, but only if we take into account the full dimensions of both our sought goal and our methods. The difference is about the wisdom of using terms without being certain people hear them as we mean them.
Dealing With Differences
Okay. If participatory economy’s advocates have the above described differences and perhaps others that I haven’t perceived, how should we navigate these differences? I think a good answer arises from the underlying values of participatory economics and participatory society. We value diversity. That means we understand it is quite valuable to have diverse views, opinions, and approaches in the air, even if operationally we can only implement one at a time. That is, though we often can’t simultaneously do all things advocates favor, we can keep different preferences on the table so that we’re constantly able to upgrade from one to another if it becomes evident that the one we have been using isn’t the one we ought to be using.
Advocates of participatory economics say that you can’t have private ownership of workplaces. Somebody else says you can. This difference is not the type I’m talking about. You don’t navigate this difference. You’re going to have to decide between the two options and to keep the option of having capitalists on the table is not really viable. You will not every day reassess that. Why? Because removing private ownership of productive assets is part of the core of the system that you support and you see the core as essential. You may reassess in light of new experiences the details of participatory planning. You may reassess the details of how to implement balanced jobs, especially across workplaces. You may reassess the details of how to fulfill equitable remuneration, especially in different workplaces. But you don’t continually reassess having private ownership versus having a productive commons. You don’t continually reassess having a corporate division of labor versus having balanced jobs. You don’t continually reassess having exploitation versus having equitable remuneration. You don’t continually reassess having markets or central planning versus having participatory planning. So I think a good way to navigate the differences discussed in this essay is to welcome them. It is to be open-minded about them. But we shouldn’t just say, okay, willy-nilly, you think that therefore, that’s right.
No. You advocate for what you believe. You make a case for what you believe, but you leave open the possibility that you are wrong so you continue to consider alternatives. What would be bad would be to be utterly inflexible about differences among advocates of a particular vision. So in the case we’re discussing it would be bad for advocates of participatory economics to treat differences among themselves about things like those we’ve been talking about above as if they are differences in principle, as if they are differences about essential core features. That is the kind of approach that leads to dumb and even suicidal splits.
Suppose you have a political approach, a movement approach, and there’s a difference within the ranks. Good would be if it’s a difference which is not about the core of the whole project, but is about the project’s details of implementation, or is about how we describe it, or is about how we understand the circumstances in which we’re pursuing it, and we recognize that those circumstances can change and our opinions might change, so we keep different contending ideas alive and keep exploring them even though at any given time for coherence we may have to arrive at a shared overall view. Bad would be to treat such differences as if they are like differing about whether or not we should have royalty, or whether or not we should have slavery, or whether or not we should have private ownership, exploitation, or markets.
In other words, we should not treat all differences alike. When we treat differences of the sort that we should preserve and pay attention to as if, instead, they are fundamental, that’s when one part of a community of advocates of something splits from another part of the community of advocates of that thing. And when that happens, it tends to be because the two subsets get caught up in their allegiance to their own view and their own identity, and not caught up in learning from unfolding experience so as to find the best outcome. The point is there are reasons for respectful dismissiveness and there are reasons to be respectful and not dismissive.
For example, if “from each according to ability to each according to need” proves itself better than equitable remuneration because of circumstances that we can’t predict now, okay, so be it. It’s better. Great. One isn’t attached to equitable remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor to the exclusion of acknowledging that something else may prove itself better. And vice versa, if it becomes obvious that equitable remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor is more essential and desirable, then you would imagine the contrary view would fade away. And similarly for differences about job balancing, allocation, or emphases of description.
We want respectful flexible exploration and refinement of views that we continually adapt to account for new experiences. We don’t want dismissive attachment to views that we inflexibly deem incontestable.
We have hit an organizational dead end in the progressive social change movement, just when we are also facing terminal threats to our species. Noam Chomsky (2019) has named the two most immediate threats: (a) the ongoing climate catastrophe and (b) the worst ever threat of nuclear war. At least a dozen species threats loom just behind these two (Pamlin and Armstrong, 2015.) Like many of you, I have spent the last 40 years doing full-time social change, including both to deal with climate change and to prevent nuclear war.. What is different about my story is that it was combat in Vietnam that led me to quit college teaching and become a full-time activist—and that dealing with the aftereffects of combat led me to spend these same forty years in two innovative peer-support (PS) communities: Co-counseling and Anonymous recovery. While both these communities have been the subject of intensive and justifiable criticism, they also both follow uncommon, positive organizational practices. Those practices suggest a way out of the organizational dead end in time to avoid annihilation.
Young people of color have named this organizational dead end as the “NGO-industrial complex” (“NGOIC”) (Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, 2017.) Following the model of corporations under capitalism, NGOICs employ highly-paid, professional staff on a permanent, career basis, using funds raised from rich people and their foundations and organize their work in a hierarchy, typically headed by an “Executive Director” (or sometimes, fashionably, two “Co-Directors.) Inevitably, the interests and values of funders push NGOs to make conservative choices in policies and tactics. Indeed, by law in the USA, the organizational form most frequently followed to give the rich the benefits of tax-deductibility, the 501 (c) (3), is prohibited from engaging in elections, grassroots lobbying beyond a small amount (5% of the first $100,000 in income), much less civil disobedience. Setting aside the threat of funding cutoffs, people who aspire and train for such NGOIC careers also support conservative policy and strategic choices for personal reasons. Their family and colleagues in the media, government, religion and other sectors recommend and reward such conservative choices. Prophetically, the German sociologist Robert Michels identified almost precisely the same NGOIC over a hundred years ago in his critique of the then powerful socialist parties in Europe (Michels, 1962.) More recently, Harvard professor Theda Skocpol blamed it for the failure of our massive environmental organizations to tackle the climate crisis in 2009. We have known about this organizational dead end for over a century and yet we still turn into it, again and again.
Indeed, the “progressive” NGOIC in the US collectively spends at least a hundred billion dollars each year in this organizational dead end and employs several hundred thousand highly-educated, dedicated, energetic workers. Yet all these crises continue to worsen.
The intentional peer support (PS) communities suggest a better direction. Following it, the Anonymous world has engaged millions of members in dozens of organizations and provides the dominant mode of recovery from most addictions. Co-counseling has 100,000 members including many activists worldwide with several offshoots. This better direction supports the approach of most non-violent, direct-action campaigns (Cornell, 2011) and the suggestions of Albert and Hahnel (1999) in “participatory economics.” (1)
Here is a small-scale example from my own experience of how it might look to build and run a social change movement on a less careerist, hierarchical and more horizontal, peer-support basis. In 2005, twenty-five young U.S. veterans, just back from the horrors of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, spent a weekend in a residential, peer-support workshop, cried in each other’s arms, and figured out how to create a movement to help each other heal and change the world that caused their pain (MacEachron and Gustavsen, 2012.) After the first evening and the next day exchanging peer support, they spent the second evening in egalitarian problem solving and planning action. First, they brainstormed the major problems confronting their generation of veterans. Then, they broke up in self-generated groups to share information, on an egalitarian footing, on how to deal with those issues: PTSD, the GI Bill, the VA, the war itself. Finally, later in the evening and the next morning, those groups reconvened and followed a horizontal process to turn their ideas into action. During that weekend, in addition to their personal healing, they helped launch organizations to help lead their generation, at least two of which are still functioning almost two decades later. Using the horizontal tools of co-counseling, we ran 85 of these residential, weekend workshops from 2005-11 for 1,500 returning US veterans. We helped reshape how the VA treats PTSD (what these younger veterans call “the moral injury of war”) and how young veterans organize politically. While weekend workshops are not an organization, these peer-support workshops based on the tools of co-counseling demonstrate how people can organize more effectively on a horizontal basis.
Here are some of the important organizing practices these two PS communities have converged upon and which may be worth considering.
EMAILS WON’T DO IT. Both these communities ask participants to spend a lot of time in their quest to change human behavior, 1-3 hours a day of specific activities. How could changing anything as fundamental and all-encompassing as our social system require less effort? Our workplaces, careers, family structure, education, you name it, most realistic observers agree, everything must change. By contrast, most “social change” NGOs rely primarily on click-activism, a flurry of emails to their members asking for money or signatures on a petition, or at most attending a local meeting once a month. STOP HOLDING OUR FIRING SQUADS IN A CIRCLE. This witticism nails our tendency on the left (in fairness, in all human activity) to act out our individual bad habits on each other—put downs, oppressive remarks and actions, suspicions, gossip, cliques. Often I think we on the left are also reacting to our ineffectiveness (or hopelessness) about changing the larger social system. By contrast, the Anonymous world works systematically on personal bad habits as an alternative to imposing them on our fellow/sister activists. Co-counseling insists its members tackle all the oppressions handed down by our society: racism, sexism, classism, etc. Again, to change any one of these habits in either community usually takes hours each week in reading, reflecting, and sharing. However, the results are worth it in both communities. For example, in both, their regular activities include long, productive meetings, intentionally positive, usually free of put downs. They hold far fewer firing-squads. THERE IS NO SHORTCUT FOR INTIMACY. The two PS communities take one-on-one, relational organizing to a deeper level (cf. Gans, 2009.) The Anonymous world rests on at least one intense mentoring relationship between “sponsor” and “sponsee” or more peer-oriented “accountability buddies.” These one-on-one relationships often involve deep emotional sharing, vulnerability and advice-giving. Likewise, co-counseling is based on such sharing. Importantly, most personal interactions in both PS communities rely on timed, uninterrupted listening turns and encourage the expression of deep feelings. By comparison, the NGOIC typically prescribes one meeting each month for any organization’s members/supporters in any geographical area. Only a small fraction of members even attend these meetings which are typically dominated by a few leaders and include little emotional content. Such interactions do not provide adequate social support for our stressful social change work. They have not attracted and retained the millions of new members and allies we need. GROUP HUGS. Rarely does the NGOIC ask an activist to join a permanent small group to get emotional support, share information and act together (Engler and Engler, 2016). By comparison, the other team—take, for example, almost any right-wing, evangelical mega-church—relies heavily on a network of small, ongoing groups (Worthnow, 1994.) So do both PS communities. Co-counseling has further refined the use of groups. When focused on social support, the co-counseling groups rely on timed turns. When the group meets to share information on a topic, participants do not use timers and instead follow simple rules: “No one speaks twice before everyone speaks once.” “No one speaks four times until everyone has spoken twice.” When groups meet to take action, they take timed turns answering four questions: First, “what have you done recently on this topic?” Second, “what else should we know on this topic?” Third, “what are you going to do?” Finally, “what might get in your way of doing what you just said you would do?” Like those evangelical churches, these two PS communities emphasize small groups. In addition, they vary the design of group meetings depending on their purpose. HOW DO GROUPS RELATE? In the NGOIC model, local groups of activists don’t relate much to each other at all. Communication flows hierarchically, not horizontally between local groups. Paid staff run national programs. Activists in local groups or chapters largely choose among suggestions or directives from the national organization. By contrast, the Anonymous model connects groups through “Intergroups,” analogous to the “Spokes council ” in the direct-action model used for civil disobedience actions. Each ongoing, small, Anonymous “Meeting” selects a temporary “direct” representative to attend monthly Intergroup meetings to make decisions affecting all the groups. The Meeting’s representatives do not make personal decisions in the Intergroup, they represent their Meeting’s thinking. If a new topic comes up, they return to their group to get guidance. Intergroup decisions are made by consensus with a majority vote used as a backup. HORIZONTAL ORGANIZATIONS—Contrary to the NGOIC hierarchical, individualistic corporate model, the basic research in organizational psychology supports a horizontal, group-centered approach (Driscoll, 1980.) It suggests that leaders rotate; staff perform tasks balanced to be equally appealing; groups decide by consensus. The Anonymous community adds: pay staff (“special workers”) to support but not lead (e.g. accounting, newsletters, emails); only volunteers lead; spokes councils connect the groups. What else is needed?
Horizontal organizations may reduce the conservative pull of the NGOIC. However, my experience with these two PS communities suggests the need for further protection. The traditional Anonymous organizations have refused to modify their policies and literature to accommodate the increasing numbers of us who identify as atheists and agnostics. The official Anonymous literature and informal culture both emphasize and enforce belief in an interventionary, personalistic force: god or a “Higher Power” (always capitalized and usually masculinized). To deal with this challenge, we secular folks have built our own informal sub-communities, such as SecularOvereaters.org (which I helped found), within and alongside the formal organizations. It includes members of the formal organization and others who choose not to join. By contrast, the formal co-counseling structure stifled attempts to correct a pattern of serious misconduct by its founder and long-time leader. In addition, both these PS communities started and have stayed overwhelmingly white and middle-class with all the racism and classism that implies. Thus, a horizontal structure is not a panacea for solving all the problems posed by the NGOIC.
A vision
Founded, as we say, by a “group of drunks” in 1934 (actually by drunks who had been recruited by the same Christian sect), the Anonymous communities have now diversified and helped millions around the world deal with a range of problems many of us previously found life- threatening. All over the world people gather every day, in person and increasingly online, in scheduled groups to support each other. Often taking timed, uninterrupted turns, they share deep feelings. They exchange information and advice. And they do it in a near-perfectly horizontal organization: completely self-supporting financially (a foundation cannot give them more than $10,000), no paid leaders; rotating leadership; consensus decision making; and governed through a set of nested spokes councils.
It can be done.
References:
Albert, Michael and Robin Hahnel. Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century. Cambridge: South End. 1991.
Chomsky, Noam. Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance.)
Oxfordshire, U.K.: Routledge, 2019.
Cornell, Andrew. Oppose and Propose: Lessons from Movement for a New Society. Oakland: AK, 2011.
Driscoll, James W. “Myths About People At Work: A Critique of Human Management Resources, Working Paper 1153-80.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, 1980.
Engler, Mark and Engler, Paul. This is an Uprising: How Non-Violent Resistance is Shaping the Twenty-First Century. New York: Nation Books, 2016.
Gans, Marshall. “Telling your public story: self, us, now.” Harvard University, Kennedy School, 2009.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Durham, NC: Duke University, 2017.
Michels, Robert. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. NY: Free Press, 1962
Pamlin, Dennis & Armstrong, Stuart. “12 Risks that threaten human civilization: The case for a new risk category.” Global Challenges Foundation. 2015.
Skocpol, Theda. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2003.
Worthnow, Robert. Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s Quest for Community. New York: Free Press, 1994.
Footnote 1: This article focuses on the organizational practices of these peer support communities. The core activity is personal growth. Anonymous organizations emphasize a rigorous process of self-examination and personal improvement (“the steps.”) and Co-counseling focuses on personal growth through processing feelings intensely. I’ve found both personally helpful.
Author Bio: A combat veteran of the US war on Vietnam, Jim Driscoll quit teaching at MIT in 1982 to work full-time in the movement for peace and justice. Raised in West Lynn, a progressive, Irish-Catholic, working-class community, he used his Ivy-League degrees to raise $30 million over the years for progressive and radical organizations which he co-founded and helped lead. Among them, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze was the largest which helped pause the Cold War. The American Peace Test helped 13,000 get arrested in Nevada in a successful effort to finally stop US nuclear testing. Arizonians for Clean Elections won full public funding for all state elections there, helping lead that national movement. Most recently, Extinction Rebellion shut down the white, northwest quadrant of DC twice over climate change. Simultaneously, for thirty years he was a low-level leader in two large, but confidential peer-support communities. His writing connects what he has learned from both the worlds of activism and peer support. He is married with two children, eight grandchildren. Over his lifetime, he chose to follow family around the country and now lives in North Bethesda, MD, USA, outside DC, where he helped launch a local Green New Deal.
On May 1 2023, various media outlets and organizations co-published an essay titled 20 Theses for Liberation. Thirty progressive activists initially signed it. 5 international organizations initially host and advocate for it. Many other venues are displaying it. And its own page at http://www.4liberation.org displays all that and additional information and also provides a form for you to add your support as another signer. I sincerely hope you will visit 4liberation.org to consider signing on yourself.
But at this point, skeptical, you might very reasonably ask: Why now? Why theses? Why sign? And what next?
As a co-author, I know the 20 Theses don’t mean to present a program. A program would differ dramatically in different countries, regions, and even cities as well as from one year and even one month and sometimes one week to the next. The 20 Theses want to bridge all those realms. And I also know the 20 Theses don’t mean to say this way or no way. They don’t mean to be commandments. They just mean to be a collection of diverse wisdom offered to try to help unify a movement of movements across issues, focuses, and borders. They offer themselves as a starting point to propel conversations to develop better, richer, more inspiring formulations. So, with that clarified, here are answers to the above four questions that propelled me to be part of this project. I hope they will resonate for you too.
Why now?
I was recently 76. That just means I have been around a long time. But being around a long time has told my eyes and ears, my beliefs and passions, that our current time is different.
I remember nightmares of nukes, the Cuban missile crisis, duck and cover, Vietnam, Indochina, maddening nationalism, and the stream of persistent barbaric international horrors since. I remember vile sentiments among elites and I remember ugly sentiments percolating through daily life each many times over. I remember ecological worries first rising to public sight a half century back and increasing ever since. And I remember much more, and yet I remember nothing so threatening to human well being and even to human survival as today’s growing fascist projects, today’s festering interpersonal and international anti social violence, today’s burning ecological nightmares, and todays growing threat of nuclear extermination. Now is to my aged eyes the most dangerous of times.
Yet I also remember the American Sixties, the French May ‘68, diverse movements churning, and varied consciousnesses rising ever since. I remember advances lost but also won. Movements born, struggling, but also slumbering. Yet, call me crazy, while I can feel in my old bones that these are the most dangerous of times, they also strike my still young soul as the most promising of times. Humanity faces possible extinction—but large sectors of humanity now know it, and many have got to already be or will soon become eager for reasoned, passionate, militant change, not solely in one realm, not solely for one moment, and not to just create a momentary pause in the ugliness, but in all realms and for all times, to create a stupendous revolution in values, views, and institutions. That is an organizer’s invitation. We can hear the invitation all over the world, from Europe to Asia, from the the Middle East to the U.S., from Africa to Latin America. In France, Germany, the UK, Iran, Israel, Sri Lanka, Peru and elsewhere, the signs of times changing are unmistakeable.
So 20 Theses, why now? Because now public opposition to racism, to sexism, and to all manner of sexual oppressiveness is rising and more and more people are ready to rumble for change. Because now, literally all around the world, working people are organizing not only for immediate gains but against systemic injustices and for encompassing liberation. And because now, the simple truth is, later may be too late. Less apocalyptically and more optimistically, because now just beneath the surface, revolutionary aspirations and spirit are awakening. Because now we need battles for immediate specific gains whose pursuit can lead to sustained multi focus struggle for a new world. And because now winning such gains in such ways will require movements that share vision and strategy and that, on that shared foundation, exercise incandescent, inspiring, mutual aid. So why now? Because now is our time for unity.
Why “Theses”?
For me, it is because to share core insights about vision and strategy sufficient for effective unity we need to enunciate, discuss, refine, and come together around bottom up, widely conceived, openly vetted and continually updated insights that can sustain collective struggle and mutual support without so over-reaching that they curtail creative diversity born from different circumstances. Theses because we do not need some presumed universal blueprint. We do not need top down marching orders. But we do need visionary and strategic unity that both respects diverse heritages and simultaneously facilitates continually emerging unifying insights.
But how can we arrive at, share, and continually update such needed insights? We can write, read, and above all listen and talk about what we have already and what we will soon experience. So why 20 Theses? The dictionary says a thesis is “a statement or theory that is put forward as a premise to be maintained or proved.” The 20 Theses for Liberation put forward 20 statements, plus an introduction and conclusion. They intend that each statement, 1 – 20, be assessed, refined, enriched, and when settled, maintained until they are further improved to be maintained anew. “Thesis” is just a word. It applies. But if you would prefer to refer to the 20 Theses as 20 statements, ideas, precepts, themes, insights, or whatever, so be it. It’s the ensuing conversation that will matter.
Why sign?
Of course signatures aren’t marches. A name on a form isn’t a strike. A name on a form isn’t itself actual face to face organizing and organization building. But many names together can convey a sense of possibility. Many names can give folks a reason to relate. Many names can convey motivation to spend some time reading, thinking, assessing, and hopefully signing on. The initial signers no doubt each hope their name will inspire attention and critical sharing. We’ll see.
But you may wonder, how can I sign on to words I didn’t write?
In all likelihood each co-author would, on their own, express this or that thesis or even all 20 Theses a little differently. Each co-author would include or remove something if he or she wanted to arrive at a perfect, precise statement of their own personal current views and inclinations. But to perfectly present each co-author’s individual views wasn’t the point. To wholly encompass any one signer’s or the sum of all signers’ totality of views wasn’t the point. The 20 Theses don’t mean to cover all things for all people. But they do hope to offer a collection of core foundational insights for, well, all those who agree. They hope to offer a starting point to work off to arrive at a set of widely shared pivotal views about vision and strategy sufficient to sustain mutual aid within an increasingly effective movement of movements. What broad shared commitments can get myriad struggles which seek different specific but compatible ends by different specific but compatible means to see themselves as all together constituting a set of intersecting mutually supportive parts of a larger whole?
You say you wouldn’t yourself formulate one or more of the 20 theses precisely the way the 20 Theses formulate them? You say you have additional ideas for or concerns about possible refinements? No problem. That will be much needed material for the conversation that the 20 Theses seek. What is now reason for you to sign is only that you, like the co-authors, feel that the 20 Theses provide a good basis for seeking shared vision and strategy, and that you agree with their intent and overall direction. So, in that case, why sign? To express your support and hope. To add your name to the call in hopes your doing so will increase its credibility and prospects.
And what next?
This may seem the hardest of the four questions, yet in most respects it is the easiest. Answer: Different strokes for different folks. First step is to get the 20 Theses and particularly the 4liberation.org site widely visible to motivate more people to sign. Second step is to add your thoughts to an emerging discussion by reposts, articles, and especially conversations so as to spread, apply, refine, and share the evolving insights. From there, we will all see together where this will go. Here is how the 4liberation.org site answers “what next?”: “Engage, Adapt, Share.”
The site suggests we each consider, How does the 20 Theses for Liberation framework relate to your context, or not? How can unifying themes about vision strategy be applied in your life? Do you have a local history or practice of collective strategic organizing? How can a shared organizing framework become more accessible and actionable in your community? How might we connect and act together?
It says, “Dig in, connect, discuss, adapt, write, create, build & share! Send articles, art, ideas, and projects to [email protected] with in the subject line.
Share on social media using #4Liberation.”
Are these steps worth some of your time to interact with your family members, friends, students, schoolmates, and co-workers? We never know in advance, do we? But I am trying to “dig in, connect, discuss, adapt, write, create, build & share” because I think it is worth my time to do so. I hope you will too.
Alexandria Shaner
On May 1 2023, an essay called 20 Theses for Liberation was co-published by various media outlets and organizations. It is co-authored by 30 progressive activists (among whom, I am one), co-hosted by 5 international organizations, and is intended to become a widely shared and dynamic organizing strategy towards mutual aims where vision, values, policy, and prefiguring can converge in an accessible and actionable way. It aims to be a “living document” on an online portal for participants to engage with and adapt while connecting with one another in solidarity.
The essay ends with a call to action for participants to engage by adapting the framework to their diverse contexts and exploring how it relates to their communities. We are each asked to make the leap from guiding vision and strategic norms, to applications in our own areas of expertise, our own lives. In this way, the 20 Theses for Liberation is intended as merely a jumping off point for a larger project of building a much needed culture of unity in collective self-determination.
What would such a shared perspective be? “The result, of course, wouldn’t be a fixed, unchangeable stance. It would instead continually alter in accord with new experiences, contexts, and insights. The best result would be a continued, collective process of refining, adapting, and utilizing a unifying framework. We would be building and sustaining a culture of coalescing around shared vision and strategy—which is the work of building a movement of movements. We would be bringing separate agendas into powerful solidarity with one another” (20 Theses for Liberation).
To kick off what we hope will be wide and diverse engagement, and in honor of International Workers Day, I was asked by one of the co-hosting organizations, RealUtopia.org, to comment on how the 20 Theses for Liberation relates to the labor movement. The relationship has nested implications:
First, the vision and strategy proposed by the 20 Theses helps us consider how we organize and progress internally, within work teams, networks, unions, federations, etc. When we look at our own organizations for struggle, are we practicing what we seek or mirroring the oppressive relations we claim to resist?
Next, the 20 Theses are applicable to building solidarity and power within the broader labor movement, beyond any one group or campaign and across industries and countries. It provides strategic norms for achieving broad worker solidarity.
Third, the 20 Theses bears on inter-movement organizing when applied to building relationships and capacity for intersectional solidarity, program, and action. For example, in building the urgently needed power bloc that includes both the labor and climate justice movements, labor must be integral in developing and forcing a just transition to a decolonized economy and society that prioritizes people and planet over profit.
Finally, via these nested applications, the 20 Theses is also a unifying vision and strategy that can be adapted to relate to diverse people from all over the world, by diverse people from all over the world. In this way, the outermost layer of all the nested applications is like a snowball picking up size and speed as it rolls onward, growing and being shaped by everyone who joins it.
Getting more specific within these nested layers of strategic organizing, below are some proposals that arise from applying the 20 Theses for Liberation to the labor movement today. Part 1 deals with applying the 20 Theses as a lens to guide labor organizers, while Part 2 explores inter-movement organizing using the example of the labor and environmental movements.
Part 1: 20 Theses for Liberation Inside Labor Organizing
The history of strategic organizing in the labor movement has been marked by changing circumstances and challenges, and it has consistently evolved, sometimes more and sometimes less successfully, to adapt to the needs of workers and achieve their goals. Today’s organizing efforts need to be inclusive, grassroots-driven, creative, legally and politically savvy, and focused on building public support. By applying lessons from the past, leveraging relevant strategies and tactics, and most importantly, by coalescing around shared vision and strategy towards mutual aims, the labor movement can make progress in advancing workers’ rights, improving working conditions, and achieving economic justice in the present day while continuously pushing towards sustained, fundamental changes in labor relations across society.
In response to the current challenges of neoliberalism, neocolonialism, systemic racism, rapid technological innovation, and ecological collapse, the labor movement has adopted new strategies and tactics like grassroots organizing, community-based campaigns, and alliances with other social movements, such as civil rights, environmental, and immigrant rights organizations. Labor unions have also used legal and political strategies to advocate for pro-worker policies, such as raising the minimum wage, expanding access to healthcare, and protecting workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively. The vision and strategy laid out in the 20 Theses for Liberation aligns with these developments, and can be used to further demands and guide strategic organizing on an increasingly radical systemic trajectory while building collective power to achieve more, faster.
Labor organizing, through the participatory lens laid out in the 20 Theses, would prioritize principles of economic democracy, equity, solidarity, and worker empowerment, as well as the sought gains of anti racist, environmental, and feminist movements. The economic vision proposed in the 20 Theses advocates for decentralized decision-making, collective ownership of productive assets, equitable distribution of resources and wealth, the protection of diversity, and ending class-based divisions of labor.
What would this mean specifically? It would look different across diverse contexts, as it should, however some concrete possibilities could develop in the following areas:
Worker Self-Management: The 20 Theses for Liberation emphasizes worker self-management, which means that decisions about workplace conditions, production processes, and distribution of goods and services are made collectively by workers themselves. Labor organizing efforts would focus on empowering workers to have a meaningful voice and decision-making power in their workplaces, through mechanisms such as worker cooperatives, workplace councils, and democratic decision-making processes. This would involve organizing efforts to promote democratic governance structures in the workplace, where workers gain steadily increasing control over their working conditions and the direction of their work.
Economic Democracy: The 20 Theses for Liberation seeks to create economic systems that are democratic and participatory, rather than hierarchically controlled by a few individuals or corporations. Labor organizing through this lens would prioritize creating democratic economic structures, where workers have a say in the allocation of resources, investment decisions, and distribution of wealth. In today’s context, this could involve advocating for policies that promote cooperative and collective ownership, profit-sharing arrangements, and participatory budgeting, where workers have a direct role in shaping economic decisions that affect their lives.
Equity and Social Justice: The 20 Theses for Liberation places a strong emphasis on equity and social justice, with the goal of eliminating disparities in income, wealth, and access to resources. Labor organizing efforts would prioritize addressing issues of inequality in the workplace, such as wage disparities, discriminatory practices, and unfair labor practices. This could involve advocating for fair labor laws, promoting pay equity, and challenging discriminatory practices that disproportionately affect marginalized workers, such as workers of color, women, LGBTQ+ workers, and workers with disabilities.
Solidarity and Cooperation: The 20 Theses for Liberation promotes cooperation and solidarity among workers and communities, rather than competition and individualism. Labor organizing through this lens would prioritize building alliances and collaborative efforts among workers, unions, communities, and other social movements. This could involve forming coalitions with other labor unions, community organizations, and social justice groups to advocate for shared issues, such as worker rights, affordable housing, healthcare, education, and sustainability practices. It could also involve promoting cooperative networks, where workers and communities collaborate and support each other in economic activities.
Education and Empowerment: The 20 Theses for Liberation emphasizes the need for education and empowerment of workers to actively participate in economic decision-making. Labor organizing efforts would prioritize educating workers about their rights, labor laws, and economic principles, as well as building their capacity to engage in collective bargaining, negotiation, and decision-making processes. This could involve providing training, resources, and support for workers to understand and navigate the economic system, and empowering them to actively participate in shaping their own economic realities. It could also involve demands for redistributing workplace tasks in a non-hierarchical and fair way, so that empowering, rote, and care-work tasks are increasingly balanced across a workplace. In the context of the need to adapt entire industries to an ecological economy, it could also involve training and re-skilling workers preemptively to transition to green jobs, and to organize policy demands for achieving a just transition for all workers that gives voice to all workers.
Sustainability and Environmental Justice: The 20 Theses for Liberation recognizes the importance of ecological responsibility and reciprocity in economic systems. Labor organizing efforts through this lens would prioritize advocating for environmentally sustainable workplace practices, addressing issues such as climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, and resource depletion as well as simultaneously advocating for policies that guarantee the livelihoods of all people. This could involve campaigns, in diverse contexts, for policies such as green job guarantees, universal basic income, broadening sustainable public provisioning systems for housing, transportation, communication, healthcare, education and food, advocating for environmental regulations, and ensuring that workers have a voice in shaping workplace practices that impact the environment. It would also mean workers participating in expanding the commons to meet the basic needs of communities sustainably.
Through these potential applications, and through a diversity of other possibilities relevant to various contexts, labor organizing using the 20 Theses for Liberation as a broad guiding framework would prioritize worker self-management, economic democracy, equity, solidarity, empowerment, and sustainability. It would seek to create workplaces and economic systems that are democratic, equitable, and socially and ecologically responsible, with the goal of empowering workers to have a meaningful voice in economic decision-making and promoting economic justice for all workers.
Part 2: Labor & Climate Action #4Liberation
Inter-movement solidarity is a key aim of the 20 Theses for Liberation and it plays a critical role in today’s labor context by fostering collaboration, amplifying voices, and building collective power. By working together with other social movements, labor unions and worker organizations can address the complex challenges faced by workers today, such as inequality, discrimination, systemic racism and sexism, and precarious work, and advocate for policies and practices that promote economic justice, sustainability, and social equity. Inter-movement solidarity is an important strategy for labor organizing efforts to build a more inclusive, resilient, and impactful movement that advances the rights and well-being of all workers.
The example that must come to the forefront of labor intersectionality today is climate justice. All workers live on Earth, and the more our economic and social systems are stressed by ecological collapse, the more workers will bear the brunt of the suffering. This is not a prediction — it is happening now, especially in the Global South, but does not exclude many workers in the Global North. The people affected disproportionately by climate change are the very people who are affected disproportionately by unjust labor relations. However, there is a positive side to this situation. Workers are also uniquely positioned at a crucial leverage point for forcing comprehensive change — production. This is an opportunity for what could be the greatest grassroots power-bloc in history, and just might be our salvation as a species.
If we are to move beyond a fossil-fuel economy and capitalism’s overall need for endless extractive growth without leaving workers behind, workers must be engaged in the struggle. The labor and climate justice movements can come together to advance their shared goals of addressing climate change by transforming our economy and society to promote wellbeing and fulfillment within planetary bounds, and advocating for workers’ rights in all countries. The 20 Theses for Liberation is relevant as a shared visionary and strategic framework to help bring these movements together, each taking leadership in their own areas of expertise, while supporting and adding their perspectives and experience to collectively pursue mutual aims.
Getting more specific will require that participants continually examine their context to assess the relevance and potential impacts of organizing strategy. However, we can begin to consider some potential strategies for collaboration and increased interdependence:
Green Jobs and Just Transition: As previously touched upon, the labor and climate justice movements can collaborate to promote the creation of green jobs and a just transition for workers in industries that are transitioning away from fossil fuels. This includes advocating for policies that support job training and job placement for workers in industries such as coal, oil, and gas that will be impacted by climate action measures. It can also mean campaigning for green jobs guarantees, shorter work weeks with a living wage, UBI, and expanding public access to basic needs. By working together, the labor and climate justice movements can ensure that the transition to a more sustainable economy is equitable and inclusive, and that workers are not left behind. If any transition is to occur, workers must have a say in what this transition should look like, in which case they will become the powerful advocates needed to force meaningful action now.
Joint Campaigns and Actions: The labor and climate justice movements can collaborate on joint campaigns and actions to advocate for policies and practices that prioritize workers’ rights and environmental protections. This could include joint rallies, protests and other actions that raise awareness about the intersectionality of climate and labor issues, and demand action from policymakers and corporations. More importantly in today’s context, moving beyond raising awareness to disruption, the mighty power of the strike must be included in the quiver of nonviolent civil-disobedience. By joining forces, the labor and climate justice movements can amplify their voices and increase their collective impact. By taking the struggle to production itself, something only workers can do, these actions will have the greatest impact.
Solidarity on Ecological and Workers’ Health: The labor and climate justice movements can work together to address both ecological health and workers’ health concerns. This includes advocating for safe and healthy working conditions, protection from hazardous substances and pollutants, and access to clean air and water for workers and communities. By collaborating on environmental and health-related issues, the labor and climate justice movements can promote policies and practices that prioritize the well-being of workers and the planet.
Advocacy for Just Climate Policies: The labor and climate justice movements can collaborate in advocating for just climate policies that prioritize the needs and rights of workers and communities, particularly those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The labor movement needs to join the environmental movement in advocating for policies that remove the economy’s dependence on growth so that we can transition to production only of what is needed for the wellbeing of people and planet. This means an end to planned obsolescence and fossil fuel subsidies, the selective downscaling of certain industries and the growth of other industries, debt forgiveness, funding public services, eliminating unnecessary waste, and ensuring that basic livelihoods are not tied to employment. It includes advocating for policies such as renewable energy and efficiency incentives, climate mitigation and adaptation measures that create green jobs, and policies that promote energy democracy and community ownership of renewable energy resources. Here again, labor and environmental concerns are aligned in the need for increasing access to the things we all need to live a good life – sustainable and good quality food, housing, transportation, and education, clean water, community, and self-determination. By anchoring organizing in shared vision and strategy, we avoid the trap of the false narrative that labor and climate concerns must be at odds. By working together, the labor and climate justice movements can advocate for policies that address the environmental, economic, and social aspects of the climate crisis.
Intersectional Approaches: The labor and climate justice movements can adopt intersectional approaches that recognize the ways in which climate change disproportionately affects the Global South and marginalized communities, including low-income workers, people of color, indigenous communities, and other vulnerable populations. By acknowledging and addressing the intersectionality of climate and labor issues, the labor and climate justice movements can collaborate on solutions that are inclusive, equitable, and just, while attracting and engaging an ever increasing number of people from all walks of life.
Consciousness Raising & Empowerment: The labor and climate justice movements can collaborate on education and awareness-building efforts to highlight the connections between climate change and workers’ rights. This includes raising awareness among workers and the broader public about the impacts of climate change on workers, the need for just transition policies, and the benefits of a sustainable and equitable economy. It means an outreach strategy that immediately engages workers and the public in democratic forums so that their voices are at the forefront of developing policy demands for a just transition. By empowering and mobilizing workers and the public, the labor and climate justice movements can build a broader base of support and increased participation towards their shared goals.
Participatory Decision-Making: The labor and climate justice movements can promote participatory decision-making processes that involve workers and communities in shaping the priorities, strategies, and tactics of their movements. This includes creating spaces for workers and community members to actively participate in decision-making processes, such as town halls, forums, people’s assemblies, and participatory planning sessions. By promoting participatory decision-making, the labor and climate justice movements can ensure that the voices and perspectives of workers and communities are leading their efforts.
Conclusions
The 20 Theses for Liberation draws on a broad range of thinking and movements from all over the world. It is intended to be continuously adapted by diverse people and movements to suit their own diverse contexts. It is a practice of commoning.
The above proposals are only one example of potential, immediate applications for this project, and like the 20 Theses essay itself, is not intended to be a fixed end, but rather the beginning of increased dialogue, deliberation, and collective action across all the interlinked spheres of life. The point of the 20 Theses for Liberation project is to place a permanent value on uniting around positive vision and strategic norms towards mutual aims. We must build a culture of strategic organizing that returns again and again, over ever changing terrain and increasing urgencies, to clear sighted vision and to solidarity.
Getting organized will be the spark that ignites the changes that people are already not just longing for, but working for, though too often in relative isolation. When we have been focused so long on resisting what we don’t want, that we lose sight of what we do want, we must return to positive vision. When we become oppressed by one another while struggling to change the very systems that promote these oppressions, we must return to practicing what we seek. When we get stuck in the specifics of policy and tactical decisions, or between contending or even conflicting interests, we must return to a shared framework to remain rooted in deep solidarity as we look for ways forward, together. When the truth is constantly obfuscated by the powerful, and by our hegemonic narratives, so that we think we are surrounded by enemies on all sides, we must return to the ideas of interdependence and community. Here, we re-discover that what we need to do to live better lives now, is exactly what we need to do for our fellow workers, for our neighbors, for our brothers and sisters on the other side of the world, and for the planet itself.
ZNetwork, DiEM25, Academy of Democratic Modernity, MetaCPC, RealUtopia, Michael Albert, Renata Avila, Ramzy Baroud, Medea Benjamin, Peter Bohmer, Fintan Bradshaw, Jeremy Brecher, Urška Breznik, Noam Chomsky, Savvina Chowdhury, Devriş Çimen, Mark Evans, Andrej Grubačić, Jason Hickel, Kathy Kelly, Arash Kolahi, Bridget Meehan, Sotiris Mitralexis, Jason Myles, Cynthia Peters, John Pilger, Matic Primc, Don Rojas, Stephen Shalom, Alexandria Shaner, Norman Solomon, Cooper Sperling, Yanis Varoufakis, Brett Wilkins, Greg Wilpert
The idea of a movement of movements is not new. The concept remains popular, logical, and inspiring yet remains just that—a concept. Near universal woes such as inequality, climate change, and fascist stirrings could pressure diverse movements into a holistic progressive bloc, and in some cases, there has already been progress towards such convergence. There is a rising desire and will for coming together, but in practice, cohesion and even solidarity remain largely elusive.
What is missing is often identified as strategic organizing, while at the same time our anti-authoritarian and pluralist values rightly cause us to shy away from rigid blueprints and vertical chains of command. However, this dilemma presents a false choice. We must get organized, but we don’t need to abandon diversity and self-determination in order to come together around vision and strategy if we build our values into shared vision. Perhaps further effort towards conceiving, sharing, and utilizing a broad but unifying vision and strategy could provide much needed structure for a movement of movements to grow and thrive. And why now? Because there currently seems to be more hunger than in a long time for unity even as there is also considerable doubt about attaining it.
Below, we propose some basic insights, claims, and commitments that all seekers of new societal relations might choose to further develop and refine. The 20 theses are not ours per se, but come from many movements over years, decades, and even centuries.
Of course, none of the organizational or individual signers agree with every word of what follows. Rather, we all feel that in sum the 20 theses provide an excellent basis for debate and elaboration that can, over time, inform not just agreed opposition to existing injustices, but collective pursuit of a better world.
Here are the twenty proposed theses we together submit for consideration, debate, and refinement.
Thesis One: Foundations
To be comprehensive and liberatory, long-term aims must centrally address polity, economy, kinship, culture, ecology, and international relations because each of these aspects of life not only profoundly influences peoples’ options and well being, but also because due to extensive entanglement, each contributes to and even reinforces and reproduces the defining features of the rest, so that all have priority strategic importance.
Thesis Two: Polity
To eliminate political elitism and domination, to be liberatory, political institutions will need to establish transparent mechanisms to carry out and evaluate political decisions and to convey to all citizens self managing political say proportionate to effects on them. To accomplish that will in turn require that liberatory political institutions include grassroots assemblies, councils, or communes (and federations of those) by which people can manifest their views. It will likewise require that liberatory political institutions provide advanced public education so people’s views are well formed and clearly expressed. And to ensure that deliberations and decisions are made consistent with people’s interests, it will require frequent direct policy participation or, when needed, re-callable representation and delegation that utilizes appropriate voting algorithms.
Additionally, to ensure freedom to each person consistent with freedom to all people, and to benefit all people while also protecting and even advancing diversity, liberatory political institutions will need to guarantee maximum civil liberties. This will of course include freedom to speak, write, worship, assemble, and organize political parties.
To ensure diversity and continuous development, liberating political institutions will need to welcome, facilitate, and protect dissent, and to guarantee to individuals and groups means to pursue their own goals consistent with not interfering with the same rights for others.
Regarding violations, to attain justice while promoting rehabilitation, liberatory political institutions will need to foster solidarity and to provide inclusive means to fairly, peacefully, and constructively adjudicate disputes and violations of agreed norms.
Finally, in light of the entanglement of all key facets of society, liberatory political institutions will have to be compatible with new features in other dimensions of life and vice versa.
Thesis Three: Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality
To achieve an end to denials based on sex, gender, identity, or age, new kinship institutions will need to ensure that no individuals or groups—by gender, identity, sexual orientation, or age—are privileged above or dominate others in income, influence, access to education, job quality, or any other dimension of life that bears on quality of life. To attain that end, liberatory gender and kin institutions will need to respect marriage and other lasting relations among adults as religious, cultural, or social practices, but will need to reject such ties as ways for sectors of the population to gain financial benefits or social status that others lack.
Both for equity and also for the enrichment of personality and affirmation that care-giving conveys, liberatory gender and kin institutions will need to respect care-giving as a central function of society including, perhaps even making, care-giving a part of every citizen’s social responsibilities, and in any event otherwise ensuring equitable burdens and benefits among people of all genders for all household and child raising practices.
Liberatory gender and kin institutions will need to not privilege certain types of family formation or role over others, but instead to actively support all types of families consistent with society’s other norms and practices. And to promote children’s well-being and affirm society’s responsibility for all children, liberatory gender and kin institutions will need to affirm the right of diverse types of families to have children and to provide them with love and a sense of rootedness and belonging, and will need to minimize or eliminate age- and or gender-based permissions and or restrictions, instead utilizing non-arbitrary means for determining when an individual is too old (or too young) or otherwise able or not able to receive benefits or shoulder responsibilities.
To ensure that each person honors the autonomy, humanity, and rights of others, liberatory gender and kin institutions will also need to centrally affirm diverse expressions of sexual pleasure, personal identity, sexual identity, gender identity, and mutual intimacy while they provide diverse, empowering sex education as well as legal prohibition against non-consensual sex.
And finally, in light of the entanglement of all key facets of society, liberatory kinship institutions will have to be compatible with new features in other dimensions of life and vice versa.
Thesis Four: Race, Ethnicity, Culture and Community
Liberating cultural/community relations, including race, ethnic, national and religious, requires that we rectify the negative historical and contemporary impacts of racist, colonial, and otherwise bigoted structures and neo-liberal policies and practices on countries and communities, especially in the global South.
Liberating culture and community will require implementing new participatory cultural/community institutions that ensure that no individuals or groups—by race, ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, or any other cultural community identification—are privileged above or dominate others. To that end, liberatory cultural and community institutions will need to ensure that people can have multiple cultural and social identities, and will need to provide space and resources for people to positively express their cultural/community identities however they choose while recognizing that which identity is most important to any particular person at any particular time depends on that person’s situation and assessments.
Liberatory cultural and community relations will also need to explicitly recognize that many rights and values exist regardless of cultural identity, so that all people deserve self management, equity, solidarity, and liberty, even while society also protects all people’s right to affiliate freely to enjoy diversity.
To end the reality and even the fear of colonization and race, caste, religious, or national suppression, liberatory cultural and community relations must also provide all cultural communities guaranteed access to means to preserve their cultural integrity and practices.
Liberatory cultural and community relations will also need to eliminate barriers to free exit from all cultural communities, including nations, and must impose no arbitrary non cultural barriers to free entry, including affirming that communities that guarantee free entry and exit can be under the complete self determination of their members so long as their policies and actions don’t conflict with society’s overall agreed norms.
And finally, in light of the entanglement of all key facets of society, liberatory cultural/community institutions will have to be compatible with new features in other dimensions of life and vice versa.
Thesis Five: Economy
Liberating economics will require implementing new economic institutions that ensure that no individuals or classes are privileged above or dominate others and that all economic actors are able to participate fully in determining their own economic lives. To attain such classlessness, liberatory economic institutions will need to preclude owning productive assets such as natural resources and factories so that ownership plays no role in determining people’s’ decision-making influence or share of income.
To attain classlessness, new economic institutions will also need to ensure that all workers have a say in decisions, to the extent possible, proportionate to effects on them, sometimes best attained by majority rule, sometimes by consensus or other arrangements. This will, in turn, entail that new economic institutions have venues for deliberation including worker and consumer councils or assemblies, including that new economic institutions eliminate corporate divisions of labor that typically give about one-fifth of workers empowering tasks while they consign to four-fifths mainly rote, repetitive, and obedient tasks.
Thus, instead of producing a class division based on differential empowerment, liberatory economic institutions will need to ensure that each worker enjoys a share of empowering tasks via suitable new designs of work that convey to all workers sufficient confidence, skills, information, and access to participate effectively in self-managed decision making.
Additionally, to attain equity, liberatory economic institutions will need to ensure that workers who work longer or harder or at more onerous conditions, doing socially valued labor (including socially valued training), earn a proportionately greater share of the social product but do not earn payment according to property, bargaining power, or the value of personal output—while all who are unable to work nonetheless receive full income.
Likewise, liberatory economic relations will need to avoid both market competition and top-down planning, since each produces class rule, alienation, and ecological degradation among other violations. In their place, liberatory economic relations will need to find ways to conduct decentralized cooperative negotiation of inputs and outputs via workers and consumers councils and federations of councils, with additional participatory facilitating structures as needed.
And finally, in light of the entanglement of all key facets of society, liberatory economic institutions will have to be compatible with new features in other dimensions of life and vice versa.
Thesis Six: Internationalism
Internationalism means valuing people in other countries and being in solidarity with their just struggles for decent lives. Liberating international relations will require implementing new participatory international institutions that ensure that no nations or geographic regions are privileged above others, and that, until that is achieved, move toward that result. As a means to that end, liberatory international relations will need to end the subordination of nations in all its forms including colonialism, neo-colonialism, and neoliberalism, but also residual differences in collective wealth.
Liberatory international policy and structures will need to foster equitable internationalist globalization in place of exploitative corporate globalization, including diminishing economic disparities in countries’ relative wealth, protecting cultural and social patterns internal to each country, and facilitating international entwinement as people desire, including implementing reparations and international exchange and aid as well as border redefinitions with these ends in mind.
Thesis Seven: Ecology
Not only for liberation, but literally for human survival, to liberate ecological relations will require implementing new participatory ecological practices that first and foremost cease and reverse unsustainable resource depletion, environmental degradation, climate change, and other ecosystem disrupting trends.
To such ends, liberatory ecological relations will need to facilitate not only an end to fossil fuels, but an ecologically sound reconstruction of society that accounts for the full ecological as well as social/personal costs and benefits of both short- and long-term economic and social choices, so that future populations can sensibly decide levels of production and consumption, preferred duration of work, degrees of self and collective reliance, energy use and harvesting, stewardship, pollution norms, climate policies, conservation practices, consumption choices, and other future policy choices.
Liberatory ecological norms and practices will also need to foster a consciousness of ecological connection, responsibility, and reciprocity so that future citizens understand and respect the ecological precautionary principle and are well prepared to decide policies regarding such matters as animal rights or vegetarianism that transcend sustainability.
Where theses 1 – 7 above address attaining a degree of visionary unity regarding what we seek, theses 8-20 below seek to attain a degree of strategic unity regarding how to win what we seek.
Thesis Eight: Organize
Liberatory organizations are needed for groups to work effectively together with shared intentions while discovering new insights, retaining and sharing lessons, and collectively applying lessons from their own experiences. Such liberatory organizations will need to facilitate learning, preserve lessons to provide continuity, combine and apply energies and insights to win changes, and sustain support for members.
Thesis Nine: Be Strategic
To win liberation requires organizing that counters cynicism with hope, that incorporates seeds of the future in the present, that grows membership and commitment among the class, nationality, cultural, age, ability, and sexual/gender constituencies to be liberated, and that wins reforms without becoming reformist. Liberatory organizing requires relevant, flexible strategy, guided by shared vision, to consistently progress along a trajectory towards lasting, fundamental change.
Thesis Ten: Center Vision
Liberatory organizing will need to realize that doubt about the possibility of a better society is a primary impediment to people seeking change. To combat cynicism rooted in doubt and to engender informed hope will therefore need to be a permanent organizing priority. To that end, liberatory organizing will need to always offer and clarify the possibility and merit of vision and the efficacy of activism, even beyond indicating, detailing, and explaining the pains people currently endure and the tenacious obstacles to change people currently confront.
Thesis Eleven: Promote Participatory Decision Making
To arrive at well-considered decisions, collectively implement decisions, and monitor that such decisions have been carried out correctly, a liberatory organization will need to provide extensive opportunities for members to participate in organizational decision making, including engaging in deliberations with others. To those ends, a liberatory organization will need to establish internal structures that facilitate everyone’s participation including, when possible, offering childcare at meetings and events, finding ways to reach out to those who might be immersed in kinship duties, striving to meet diverse accessibility needs, and aiding those with busy work schedules.
A liberatory organization will need to also provide transparency regarding all actions by elected or delegated leaders, including placing a high burden of proof on keeping secret any agenda, whether to avoid repression or for any other reason, and to provide a mechanism to recall leaders or representatives who members believe are not adequately representing them, as well as to provide means to fairly, peacefully, and constructively resolve internal disputes.
Thesis Twelve: Build Empowerment, Not Hierarchy
To be liberatory, an organization’s structure and policies will need to approximate, as well as circumstances and priorities allow, the self-management norm that “each member has decision making influence proportional to the degree they are affected.”
To that end, a liberatory organization will need to be internally classless including being structured so that a minority who are initially disproportionately equipped with needed skills, information, and confidence do not form a formal or informal decision-making hierarchy that leaves initially less-prepared members to perpetually follow orders or perform only rote tasks.
Likewise, over time, a liberatory organization needs to apportion empowering and disempowering tasks to ensure that no individuals or sectors of members have a relative monopoly on information or position, and no subset of members has disproportionate say whether due to race, gender, class, or other attributes.
Thesis Thirteen: Celebrate & Protect Diversity
A liberatory organization must monitor and work to correct instances of sexism, racism, classism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia, including having diverse roles suitable to people with different backgrounds, personal priorities, and personal situations.
To those ends, a liberatory organization will need to celebrate internal debate and dissent and to allow dissenting views to exist and be tested alongside preferred views. It will need to guarantee members’ rights to organize “currents” or “caucuses” with full rights of democratic debate.
Likewise, a liberatory organization will need to ensure that national, regional, city, and local chapters, as well as different sectors of the organization, can respond to their own circumstances and implement their own programs as they choose, so long as their choices do not block other groups equally addressing their own situations, or deny the shared goals and principles of the whole organization.
Liberatory organizing will need to plant the seeds of the future in the present to enhance hope, to test and refine ideas, and to learn experiential lessons able to inform strategy and vision. To plant seeds of the future under present class, race, gender, sexual, age, ability, and power relations, liberatory organizing will need to not only constructively address the ways it’s members interrelate but to also establish internal norms that support building exemplary workplace, campus, and community institutions that represent and refine the values of the movement, which the organization then in turn offers as liberating alternatives to the status quo it combats.
Thesis Fifteen: Engage in Outreach & Build Structures of Outreach
To constantly grow membership among the class, community, nationality, and gender constituencies it aims to liberate, liberatory organizing will need to learn from and seek unity with audiences far wider than its own membership. It will need to attract and affirmatively empower young people and to organize people currently critical and even hostile to its aims, not least by participating in, supporting, building, and aiding diverse social movements and struggles beyond its own immediate agendas, and also by explicitly directly and respectfully addressing critical and even hostile constituencies in communities, on campuses, and at work.
Liberatory organizing will also need to seek, develop, debate, disseminate, and advocate truthful news, analysis, vision, and strategy among its members and especially in the wider society, including developing and sustaining needed media institutions and means of face-to-face communication as well as using diverse methods of agitation and struggle—from educational efforts to rallies, marches, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, occupations, and diverse direct action campaigns—to win gains and build movements.
Thesis Sixteen: Build Power Blocs
To sustain deep unity, liberatory organizing will need to go beyond seeking coalitions of diverse organizations and movements who agree on a minimum focus, to develop new forms of cross-constituency and cross-issue mutuality. New blocs of activist movements, campaigns, and organizations will often need to take as their shared program not a least common component of what they all individually favor, but the totality of their individual priorities, even including their differences, so that each movement, campaign, and organization in the bloc aids the rest and all thereby become dramatically more powerful.
Thesis Seventeen: Build Trajectories of Commitment & Momentum
Liberatory organizing will need to seek changes in society for citizens to enjoy immediately, while it also establishes by the words and methods of its struggles, the means it uses in its organizing, and the ideas it broaches and broadcasts, a likelihood that all those involved will pursue and win more change in the future. Liberatory organizing will need to seek short-term changes of its own conception by its own actions, but also need to seek short term changes that others conceive by supporting other movements and projects, both internationally, by country, and also locally, including addressing such matters as climate change, arms control, war and peace, the level and composition of economic output, income, agricultural relations, education, health care, housing, income distribution, duration of work, gender roles, racial relations, immigration, policing, media, law, and legislation.
Liberatory organizing will need to seek and win gains by means that reduce oppression in the present and that prepare means, methods, and allegiances able to win more gains in the future, always leading toward liberation.
Thesis Eighteen: Choose Tactics to Serve Strategy
Liberatory organizing must embrace a diversity of tactics suited to diverse contexts that best serve flexible, resilient strategies guided by shared vision.
Liberatory organizing will need to connect efforts, resources, and lessons across continents and from country to country, region to region, community to community, workplace to workplace, and campus to campus, even as it also recognizes that strategies and tactics suitable to different places and different times will differ.
Liberatory organizing will need to take a long and encompassing view, so as to focus not solely on immediate tactical success or failure—such as stopping a meeting, completing a march, or winning a vote—but also and even mainly on broader matters such as how many new people are reached, what commitments are enlarged or enriched, and what infrastructure is created. It will need to combine respect for the urgency of immediate injustices that need to be righted with the patience that major long-term change requires.
Liberatory organizing will, to that end, need to understand that vision orients aims, strategy informs program, and tactics implement plans. For each, it will need to pay close attention to implications of choices for advancing immediate campaigns, organization, and consciousness, but also for advancing longer run prospects, all for those immediately involved and for those viewing from a distance. For example, it will need to judge calls for participation in electoral politics case by case, including cultivating a cautious electoral attitude because of the captivating and corrupting dynamics of electoral campaigns, even while also recognizing their outreach potential and reform relevance.
Thesis Nineteen: Practice Regenerative Organizing
Liberatory organizing will need to develop mechanisms that provide financial, legal, employment, and emotional support to its members so that its members can be in better positions to participate in campaigns as fully as they wish and to navigate the various challenges and sometimes negative effects of taking part in radical actions.
Liberatory organizing will need to substantially improve the life situations of its members, including aiding their feelings of self-worth, their knowledge, skills, and confidence, their mental, physical, sexual, and spiritual health, and even their social ties and engagements and leisure enjoyments. It will need to take a positive approach in all interpersonal and organizational matters, always seeking ways forward. It will need to address disagreements not to win against others, or to elevate self, but to find ways all can progress collectively successfully. Thus minority positions will need to be protected and preserved, as possible, in case in time they prove essential.
Thesis Twenty: Foster Leadership From Below
Liberatory organizing will need to understand that we are all different and that successful insights and paths forward are found, communicated, and advocated by some people earlier than by others in acts of “leadership”. Liberatory organizing will need to celebrate such acts but also to prioritize methods that ensure acts of leadership do not yield lasting differential empowerment. The key personal contribution of any leading person or group is elevating other persons or groups into leading, while organizational relations must propel and abet that priority.
Conclusion: Three Goals
Our primary goal is to make the case that organizers and diverse movements would benefit immensely from a widely shared positive perspective. We would benefit from a framework for coalescing around shared vision and strategy, for helping to identify shared aims, and for leveraging collective power to win immediate reforms on a trajectory of societal transformation.
Would it matter if activists were to arrive at such a shared outlook that could span a country, many countries, or even the world? Would it matter if people who mainly address and seek anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, anti-ecocide, or anti-war gains were to all share a unifying positive vision? Would it matter if behind calls to enrich and align struggles in different places for different gains, there arose a shared perspective?
If not, there’s no need to think further on sharing these or any other theses on liberation. But if such a shared stance could assist each progressive, radical, revolutionary endeavor and could especially align them into much more effective mutual support, then seriously considering the idea of arriving at a shared positive perspective and a strategy for achieving it is essential.
Our second goal is to move forward from identifying the need for a widely shared visionary and strategic framework, to proposing this particular draft framework for engagement. Are these ‘20 Theses for Liberation’ sensible, flexible, and general, but also rich enough to sustain a productive discussion and even generate shared, effective advocacy? They come from movements, experiences, organizations and diverse individuals, but we do not propose them as the only possible formulation.
Across the broad spectrum of progressive and radical movements, there are sure to be reactions that these 20 theses are too long, too specific, lack something favorable, include something unfavorable, go beyond our means, utilize imprecise or un-preferred terminology, or are just something that no matter how worthy, will likely be ignored. Our hope is that these concerns are not a stopping point, but a starting point for undertaking further examination, discussion, debate, improvements, and refinements towards a shared basis, however different it might look from this draft, for future activism and organization building.
How might such a final shared viewpoint emerge? By people talking, writing, reading, debating in person, in periodicals, in organizations. The result, of course, wouldn’t be a fixed, unchangeable stance. It would instead continually alter in accord with new experiences, contexts, and insights. The best result would be a continued, collective process of refining, adapting, and utilizing a unifying framework. We would be building and sustaining a culture of coalescing around shared vision and strategy—which is the work of building a movement of movements. We would be bringing separate agendas into powerful solidarity with one another.
Our third and final goal is to invite engagement and responses to these 20 Theses, for which we must stop writing and start listening.
Telos is the ancient Greek word for ‘end’, or ‘perfection’, or ‘purpose’. Hence, teleology is the philosophical discipline which seeks to understand the proper purpose of things. The basic idea animating teleology in Classical Greek philosophy is that every type of living being has a distinctive essential nature. When this nature is fulfilled, the genuine flourishing of that being naturally occurs.
But nature itself, though self-balancing over the long run, is complex. Hence, there are all sorts of ways in which any given being – such as a person within a political community – can be unbalanced in his or her own natural tendencies. The unbalanced person may, for example, lack self-control. Such a person will act impulsively according to their immediate feelings, fears, and desires, without the proper governance of their instincts by well-trained habits, moral insight, and long-range reasoning. Such a person fails to fulfil their genuinely human nature and will be alienated from their own essential humanity. Such a person will be in conflict with the community to whom they belong. Any community habitually characterized by tendencies that are un-natural will be in dissonance with itself and other communities, will be at odds with the divine order of the cosmos, and will be unsustainably parasitic on the human and natural ecosystems on which the life of that community depend.
Being disordered in one’s natural inclinations is a perennial problem for human individuals and communities. For this reason, children have to be formed to have virtuous characters so that they can grow up to be in wise and rational control of their desires and fears. One only becomes fully human – that is, realizes one’s true human nature – by rational self-mastery and moral discipline. And yet, Aristotle maintains, things naturally tend towards flourishing.
To Aristotle there is a necessary relationship between what is natural and what is good. Equally, there is a necessary relationship between what is unnatural and what is bad. Aristotelian teleology, then, reads moral goodness off from natural flourishing. Here, when any person is being genuinely natural, they are also being morally good, and their life exemplifies the excellence (virtue) of genuine human flourishing.
Aristotle was one of the foundering minds of political science in the Western intellectual tradition. After carefully describing many different political constitutions in the ancient world, Aristotle sought to understand the different ways in which all political structures are trying to achieve human flourishing. Aristotle clearly understood that power in any civic context is both necessary and dangerous, so a civic community that is genuinely oriented to the highest and common good is a project that can never be once and for all time realized. No constitutional structure in itself ‘achieves’ political success, but the community that appreciates the benefits of genuine power, and guards against the ‘un-natural’ pitfalls of power, and that aims at true goodness for all, will be able to continuously renew itself. But whilst flourishing is what we all naturally aspire to, the ‘un-natural’ tendency for moral laziness to settle in on any comfortable citizenry, and the harvesting of popular approval by the politically ambitious for their own advantage, must be constantly guarded against by any political form of life.
Aristotle thought that the distinctive essence of human nature is that we are speech using beings. We are uniquely “political animals” who can only genuinely flourish when we use rational and moral persuasion to pursue human happiness together. So orienting our common lives together, via public speech, to pursue the Highest Good – or, to use Cicero’s Latin phrase, the Summum Bonum – is a civic community that is aiming at that goal (telos) of a humanly flourishing polity.
Aristotle was very interested in what imbalances were likely to be endemic to different political structures, and he developed the idea of the political revolution to point this out. He thought that tyranny was always produced by some terrible civic crisis that concentrated power in just one person, but that power cannot actually be maintained only by one, so tyranny evolves naturally into oligarchy. Oligarchy is also unstable, as once power has been divulged downward, more people want a share of it; thus oligarchy evolves naturally into democracy. Democracy is also inherently unstable because crowd manipulating popularists easily exploit this form of power for their own interests, at the cost of the genuine flourishing of the polity. So democracy evolves naturally into anarchy, which produces the collapse of civic order, and calls forth a powerful tyrant to impose order. And so the political cycle (revolution) continues and never finally settles on any one form of government.
Whatever one may think of Aristotle’s political science, teleology remains indispensable if one wishes to know if any public institution or civic ideal is succeeding or failing. When it comes to our distinctive type of politics – that is, Western, modern, secular, liberal, and democratic politics – one has to have some idea of what makes for a polity that promotes human flourishing before one can tell if our democracy is succeeding or failing.
However, teleology has been in serious trouble as a feature of Western political philosophy since the revolt against Aristotle that started with the rise of the modern era. This produces a difficult problem for us if we are trying to work out if democracy is succeeding or failing, and what makes it succeed, and what makes it fail.
If we have no clear idea of what morally characterizes human flourishing in a political context, and no clear vision of the highest good to which we are continuously politically aspiring, then we have no clear means of judging whether our democracy is succeeding or failing. We may well be able to sense a turn of the political wheel creeping up on us, and we may not like the post-truth turn towards popularist demagogues on the one hand, and ever more centralized and civically unaccountable state and corporate power on the other hand, but we cannot say what is unnatural and immoral about this situation if we only have a procedural understanding of what democracy is. If we do not have any genuinely teleological understanding of how democracy should promote human flourishing, then the movement of real power away from the demos is simply an observable fact which we may not like, rather than something that is inherently unnatural and at odds with human flourishing.
In the Australian context, Stan Grant and Malcolm Turnbull both have much to say on ‘the falling of the dusk’, and the pressing need to ‘defend democracy’, where both sense real peril to our democratic form of political life. Yet, both thinkers are remarkably philosophically thin when it comes to why liberal democracy defines a genuinely flourishing political form of life. They tell me that they don’t like the erosion of democracy, but they do not tell me what is inherently bad about the emerging post-political dynamics of power in a techno-feudal, algorithmically manipulated, and increasingly conflict prone and populist age. What if the majority of Australians really don’t care about the erosion of democratic politics?
I think a strong argument can be made that throwing Aristotelian teleology out is intimately linked with the pending failure of our democracies. Let me put this argument to you now.
Francis Bacon was famously uninterested in metaphysics. To him, practical power is what really matters, and such power can only be had by what we now call scientific knowledge. Here, the experimental and mathematical knowledge of how Nature works enables us to have power over her, gives us freedom from her destructive vicissitudes, and promotes human utility. Indeed, to Bacon, science is a theological and eschatological enterprise. God has given us dominion over the earth, and science is the way we will recover this lost dominion after the fall. Further, as the prophet Daniel foretold, knowledge will greatly increase in the last days, so the advance of science will hurry along the end of the age of toil and struggle, and lead us into a great and shining future. The deeply modern belief in the obvious link between advances in science and utopian progress is the secularization of Bacon’s eschatology.
Notably, university learning was intimately linked with Aristotle and the Church in early modernity, and traditional teleological categories were also integral with how university educated professionals understood law and politics. But the pragmatic advancement of science gradually got rid of teleology and was inclined to ignore or entirely re-draw medieval theological thought, to suit more post-Aristotelian tastes. Notably, Pierre Gassendi’s successful revival of ancient atomism facilitated the recovery of Empiricist, Epicurean and Democritan approaches to natural knowledge, which simply dropped the idea that purpose was a real feature of nature. This needs to be unpacked a little.
To Aristotle, everything has four causes: material, efficient, formal and final. We still understand material and efficient causes in nature (which is what modern physics studies) but formal causation concerns the intellective essence (the ‘form’) of any given being, and final causation concerns the natural ‘end’ or purpose to which that being tends. Put simply, modern science does not think essential natures and intrinsic purposes are features of natural reality. We now typically think that whatever is natural simply is – it has no moral or essential meaning – because natural reality is made up of atoms, in motion, in space, only. Observable, manipulable and material Nature does not have any value or purpose. Value and purpose have thus migrated out of Nature and into Culture.
Value and purpose are now humanly concocted meanings that we create and project onto nature, rather than value and meaning being anything you can discover from observing nature. Hence, teleology as an observation-based science giving us fact-grounded moral and purposive truths, has been abandoned in the age of modern science. Nature is here eviscerated of any real intrinsic qualities and essential purposes.
In the modern era Nature starts to become a merely factual domain of materially manipulable things that have no intrinsic moral or purposive meanings, and Culture starts to become a purely poetic construction of humanly dreamed up meanings and values.
I say “starts to become” because Western moral values and civic purposes do not cease to be profoundly defined by overtly Christian theological and Aristotelian philosophical categories until as recently as the 1970s. All the way through early modernity Aristotelian categories of Natural Law (where what is natural is what is good) and Christian categories of high meaning, continued to deeply shape Western forms of law and governance. There is a notable switch in the late 19th century where – according to the historian of modern science and religion, Peter Harrison – a “remarkable reversal” happens such that instead of Christian theology holding final authority as qualitative and essential public truth, an explicitly secularized science comes to replace transcendent religious truth with quantified and pragmatic truth. But this reversal takes about 100 years to work its way from elite progressive and secularizing intellectual circles into the common life of the West.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s is the most overt face of a broad rejection of Christian and Natural Law categories of what is good and respectable in the public domain. Popular youth culture now embraces a genuinely modern ‘naturalism’ where Nature herself has nothing to say about what is right or wrong, or what promotes flourishing or harm (though Nature does tell us what is pleasurable, and pleasure becomes the only natural good). At this point radical avant-garde progressives break out of an elite intellectual sub-culture and the long march away from Western Christendom turns a decisive cultural corner. Here Nature tells us no moral right or wrong, and Culture simply makes up whatever values and meanings that suit.
Yet, the post-war boom era of hedonic consumer capitalism centres value and meaning not in Culture as such, but in liberal individualism. Here purposes and moral meanings are entirely located in the private domain of personal choice. At this point, traditional Natural Law categories of what is intrinsically and naturally good, and traditional Christian categories of what the divinely ordained cosmic order looks like, are dropped.
So now we cannot say what the common good telos of liberal democracy is, other than it gives individuals whatever they want (if they can afford it), it allows them to believe whatever they like about religion and morality, and it gives individuals whatever legally legitimate personal construction of purpose and meaning that they wish to choose. This is an entirely different context to the birth of modern democracy in the English-speaking world, which is tied to the traditions of the English parliament, to the experiment of the United States, to the mid 19th century wave of European constitutional democracies, and – last of all – to the birth of the Australian nation and its distinctive political system in 1901.
English language modern democratic government is birthed in a Christian and Natural Law culture. Here, the moral purpose of the polity itself was both revealed partially by Nature, but also defined by transcendent theological truths. Values and purposes were here ‘bigger’ than individual freedom, and gave a positive moral and cosmic meaning to genuine human freedom. But this sort of democracy requires Natural Law categories of moral truth that are incumbent upon all citizens whatever their private moral and religious convictions may be, and a public respect for the transcendent theological categories of high meaning defining justice (in distinction from mere power) and authority (in distinction from mere legal and procedural correctness). Such an outlook grounds the public institutions of law and government in something morally higher than the ‘black box’ proceduralism of a simply legally correct parliamentary and electoral process.
We have now secularized political power well beyond the formal separation of church and state, such that all theological categories are now largely excluded from the public domain. We have now privatized all moral and purpose categories and made the public domain rigorously procedural and amorally pragmatic (i.e., the ‘good’ is defined largely in terms of wealth, safety, and national pride – none of which are inherently moral categories at all). Thus we have removed the high meanings, moral commitments, and common purposes that were assumed in the birth of our democracies. But can our democracies as they were originally envisioned survive in a public culture that is now so comparatively morally and theologically impoverished?
Plato’s Republic is trying to think what the ideal political community – the city that facilitates true human flourishing – is like. In Book Two, the interlocutors reject a luxury oriented state, calling this – reminiscent of one of Odysseus’ strange adventures – a City of Pigs. Here, via the unbridled indulgence of our animal desires for pleasure and ease, we lose our humanity and become sub-human. In fact, we become pen animals to be harvested by those powerful enchanters who control us through controlling our food troughs. (A well-known truism among those who study information and surveillance technology notes that if an on-line product is free, then the user is the product!)
As both Plato and Aristotle see it, any polity primarily set up for sensual luxury is a fevered city which mis-reads human nature as defined merely by sub-rational animal interests. For humans do not have the same nature as creatures without speech. Speech is unique to the human animal, and makes us uniquely human, for it is by speech that we are more than brutes, we pursue the highest good, and we participate in divine things – justice, beauty, reason, goodness, and so on. But now that the West has effectively flung off the remnants of Christendom and Natural Law, Nature has no moral value and no essential or transcendently anchored purposes, but Culture simply manufactures ‘values’ and ‘purposes’ which each individual can pick and choose as they like. Under such cultural conditions we rather assume that our brute animal nature is our only real nature, and then the City of Pigs is the only sensible and realistic form of political life we can imagine. As Bill Clinton famously discerned, in such a context, politics amounts to nothing more than “the economy” (and we hungry pigs all stupidly agree).
Could it be that democracy in the Western nation-state tradition is no longer defined by the assumed categories of Natural Law and sacred transcendence that were part and parcel of its origins? Could it be that only a City of Pigs makes sense to both the electorate and our pragmatic political class for we no longer have any assumed understanding of what the distinctly human purposes are that a polity must aspire to facilitate? Could it be that in our post-Christian context there is no sacred participation of justice and authority in any higher truths than simply wealth, power, and interest?
It is the 25th of April as I write. I went to the dawn service in ANZAC Square in Brisbane this morning. Noticeably, the plaque on the shrine read “For God, King, and Empire”. I hazard that none of the participants in that service thought the real meaning of the sacrifice of young men at Gallipoli in 1915 was Australia’s loyalty – to the death – to God, King, and Empire. And yet we all stood when the King’s representative (the Governor of Queensland) arrived, and prayers and hymns to the Christian God were indeed integral with that service, and the Christian hope of the resurrection of the dead was unflinchingly proclaimed by the Anglican chaplain of that service (and the English monarch – who is also Australia’s king – is still the Head of the Anglican Church). It seems that the habits, the ceremonies, the public theology, the natural law categories of intrinsic human dignity, and the liturgies of the past still resonates with our very secularized and consumer formed polity, even if the meanings of the past are now both unknown to us, and beyond our coherent articulation.
In the post-Howard era the meaning of the ANZAC legend has been nearly completely re-created in order to give spiritually starved Australians at least some sense of higher meaning, and some sort of nebulously transcendent reason to be prepared to sacrifice the lives of their young sons (and daughters) to the Australian nation. But this new meaning rests on old categories of divinely gifted dignity and essential human nature that, perhaps, our City of Pigs age can never really wipe from our hearts and minds. Perhaps, even, Aristotle and the Bible are right about what it really means to be human?
This morning I got the impression that we really don’t understand our own fore fathers and mothers from the early 20th century. We think we are commemorating those who died in the defense of our nation to keep us free – we have no thoughts about God, King, or Empire now. And of course, being an invading force in Turkey, there is no case to be made that our legendary first ANZACs were defending or even serving Australia. How the categories of meaning, of high purpose, of human flourishing have changed in a little over a century. How the meaning of history has been recast by the present. The context of assumed shared meanings is incredibly important when we try and think about what our polity is for, and about whether our form of political life is serving human flourishing or has been corrupted.
So what makes Australian democracy fail, and what makes it succeed?
The Australian democracy arises out of the English Crown and Parliament tradition. That tradition is embedded in Christian theological and Natural Law understandings of the sacred origins of justice and political authority. Here, the concepts of the essential meaning of human nature and the good polity are defined by: ruling sovereignty as a divinely mediated sacrament; the imago Dei giving equal dignity to all people; the sacred role of speech in deliberative power, and; the collective pursuit of the Summum Bonum as the goal of any good polity.
We have systematically undone our public heritage in Christian theology and Natural Law teleology since the 1970s, so we will not be able to uphold the kind of democracy that our founding fathers envisioned. Their vision for us is failing because we no longer share their basic philosophical, theological, and moral convictions, or their vision of what humanity essentially is. We now rather want politics to promote Australia as a City of Pigs.
English origin democracy is not well suited to the kind of polity we seem to now want. According to Yanis Varoufakis global techno-feudalism is replacing both capitalist economics and nation-state democratic politics, and according to Shoshana Zuboff, individualized deep surveillance marketing is powerfully training us to be happy little pigs with our snouts firmly in the global corporate, informational, entertainment, financial industry, and military-industrial (US aligned) trough. We are not going to need democratic politics with this future already firmly in place. So frankly, I can’t now see what could make Australian democracy – at least in continuity with its pre-1970s origins – succeed. It looks like Aristotle is right again. We are in for a revolution in political life-form, if it has not already happened.
Then again, perhaps the above is too bleak. All we need to do to revive democracy in our English system tradition is to recover a sense of the meaning of human flourishing that is bigger than being fat and happy pigs pursuing our own private interests. The structures of power are still officially accountable to the people. If the people can envision a genuinely moral and genuinely high vision of what it means to be human, and what collective human flourishing actually looks like, then we do not need to give in to the City of Pigs. Why should we go quietly into that political night? How about we intelligently and diligently resist abdicating the responsibilities of the democratic citizenry and stop handing power over to the new alliances forming between information technology, corporate power and the all-knowing nanny state? Why don’t we try that?
Dr Paul Tyson is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Tyson is an integral thinker who works across philosophy, theology and sociology. Metaphysics and epistemology, understood not only philosophically and theoretically, but equally theologically and sociologically, are his areas of interest. At present he is a Principal Investigator and the Project Co-coordinator for the “After Science and Religion” project, run through IASH. This project stems from Professor Peter Harrison’s 2015 text, The Territories of Science and Religion, and seeks to re-think what both science and religion could look like as we move forward.
As we wrote a few weeks earlier, Stella Morris-Assange, lawyer and partner of Julian Assange, came to Greece. The occasion was the screening of the documentary “Ithaca – the battle for the liberation of Julian Assange” at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and at the special screening organized in Athens by mέta | the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation. After all, this documentary was created precisely for this reason: to be a “vehicle” with which John Shipton, Julian’s father, and Stella will travel the world to convey the story of the journalist and activist who is being persecuted simply for making the truth of the US war crimes known to the world.
During the few hours that Stella Assange spent in Athens, she agreed to give us an interview. All of our editorial teams have stood by Julian from the beginning. And the Italian team recently coordinated two major public awareness events. Stella Assange spoke about the role of social movements today, the need to turn the spotlight back from Julian to the US, the CIA and the war crimes revealed by Wikileaks, and shared with us the benchmarks from which she draws hope. The interview was conducted by Mariannella Kloka. The editing was done by Christina Anna Dafni.
In a hypothetical race to claim the mantle of biggest threat to humanity, nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, rising authoritarianism, and new pandemics are still well in front of the pack. But, look there, way back but coming on fast. Is that AI? Is it a friend rushing forward to help us, or another foe rushing forward to bury us?
As a point of departure for this essay, in their recent Op Ed in The New York Times Noam Chomsky and two of his academic colleagues—Ian Roberts, a linguistics professor at the University of Cambridge, and Jeffrey Watumull, a philosopher who is also the director of artificial intelligence at a tech company—tell us that “however useful these [AI] programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects….”
They continue: “Unlike humans, for example, who are endowed with a universal grammar that limits the languages we can learn to those with a certain kind of almost mathematical elegance, these programs learn humanly possible and humanly impossible languages with equal facility.”
Readers might take these comments to mean current AI so differs from how humans communicate that predictions that AI will displace humans in any but a few minor domains is hype. The new Chatbots, painters, programmers, robots, and what all are impressive engineering projects but nothing to get overly agitated about. Current AI handles language in ways very far from what now allows humans to use language as well as we do. More, current AIs’ neural networks and large language models are encoded with “ineradicable defects” that prevent the AIs from using language and thinking remotely as well as people. The Op Ed’s reasoning feels like a scientist hearing talk about a perpetual motion machine that is going to revolutionize everything. The scientist has theories that tell her a perpetual motion machine is impossible. The scientist therefore says the hubbub about some company offering one is hype. More, the scientist knows the hubbub can’t be true even without a glance at what the offered machine is in fact doing. It may look like perpetual motion, but it can’t be, so it isn’t. But what if the scientist is right that it is not perpetual motion but nonetheless the machine is rapidly gaining users and doing harm, with much more harm to come?
Chomsky, Roberts, and Watumull say humans use language as adroitly as we do because we have in our minds a human language faculty that includes certain properties. If we didn’t have that, or if our faculty wasn’t as restrictive as it is, then we would be more like birds or bees, dogs or chimps, but not like ourselves. More, one surefire way we can know that another language-using system doesn’t have a language faculty with our language faculty’s features is if it can do just as well with a totally made up nonhuman language as it can do with a specifically human language like English or Japanese. The Op Ed argues that the modern chatbots are of just that sort. It deduces that they cannot be linguistically competent in the same ways that humans are linguistically competent.
Applied more broadly, the argument is that humans have a language faculty, a visual faculty, and what we might call an explanatory faculty that provide the means by which we converse, see, and develop explanations. These faculties permit us a rich range of abilities. As a condition of doing so, however, they also impose limits on other conceivable abilities. In contrast, current AIs do just as well with languages that humans can’t possibly use as with ones we can use. This reveals that they have nothing remotely like the innate human language faculty since, if they had that, it would rule out the non human languages. But does this mean AIs cannot, in principle, achieve competency as broad, deep, and even creative as ours because they do not have faculties with the particular restrictive properties that our faculties have? Does it mean that whatever they do when they speak sentences, when they describe things in their visual field, or when they offer explanations for events we ask them about—not to mention when they pass the bar exam in the 90th percentile or compose sad or happy, reggae or rock songs to order—they not only aren’t doing what humans do, but also they can’t achieve outcomes of the quality humans achieve?
If the Op Ed said current AIs don’t have features like we have so they can’t do things the way we do things, that would be fine. In that case, it could be true that AIs can’t do things as well as we do them, but it could also be true that for many types of exams, SATs and Bar Exams, for example, they can outperform the vast majority of the population. What happens tomorrow with GPT 4 and in a few months with GPT 5, or in a year or two with GPT 6 and 7, much less later with GPT 10? What if, as seems to be the case, current AIs have different features than humans but those different features let it do many things we do differently than we do them, but as well or even better than we do them?
The logical problem with the Op Ed is that it seems to assume that only human methods can, in many cases, attain human-level results. The practical problem is that the Op Ed may cause many people to think that nothing very important is going on or even could be going on, without even examining what is in fact going on. But what if something very important is going on? And if so, does it matter?
If the Op Ed focused only on the question “is contemporary AI intelligent in the same way humans are intelligent,” the authors’ answer is no, and in this they are surely right. That the authors then emphasize that they “fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of AI—machine learning—will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge,” is also fair. Likewise, it is true that when current programs pass the Turing test, if they haven’t already done so, it won’t mean that they think and talk the same way we do, or that how they passed the test will tell us anything about how we converse or think. But their passing the test will tell us that we can no longer hear or read their words and from that alone distinguish their thoughts and words from our thoughts and words. But will this matter?
Chomsky, Roberts, and Watumull’s essay seems to imply that AI’s methodological difference from human faculties means that what AI programs can do will be severely limited compared to what humans can do. The authors acknowledge that what AI can do may be minimally useful (or misused), but they add that nothing much is going on comparable to human intelligence or creativity. Cognitive science is not advancing and may be set back. AIs can soundly outplay every human over a chessboard. Yes, but so what? These dismissals are fair enough, but does the fact that current AI generates text, pictures, software, counseling, medical care, exam answers, or whatever else by a different path than humans arrive at very similar outputs mean that current AI didn’t arrive there at all? Does the fact that current AI functions differently than we do necessarily mean, in particular, that it cannot attain linguistic results like those we attain? Does an AI being able to understand nonhuman languages necessarily indicate that the AI cannot exceed human capacities in human languages, or in other areas?
Programs able to do information-based linguistic tasks are very different, we believe, than tractors able to lift more weight than humans, or hand calculators able to handle numbers better than humans. This is partly because AI may take various tasks away from humans. In cases of onerous, unappealing tasks this could be socially beneficial supposing we fairly apportion the remaining work. But what about when capitalist priorities impose escalating unemployment? That OpenAI and other capitalist AI firms exploit cheap overseas labor to label pictures for AI visual training ought not come as a surprise. But perhaps just as socially important, what about the psychological implications of AI growth?
As machines became better able to lift for us, humans became less able to lift. As machines became better able to perform mathematical calculations for us, humans became less able to perform mathematical calculations. Having lost some personal capacity or inclination to lift or to calculate was no big deal. The benefits outweighed the deficits. Even programs that literally trounce the best human players at chess, go, video games, and poker (though the programs do not play the way humans do), had only a fleeting psychological effect. Humans still do those very human things. Humans even learn from studying the games the programs play—though not enough to get anywhere near as good as the programs. But what happens if AI becomes able to write letters better than humans, write essays better, compose music better, plan agendas better, write software better, produce images better, answer questions better, construct films better, design buildings better, teach better, converse better, and perhaps even provide elderly care, child care, medical diagnoses, and even mental health counseling better—or, in each case, forget about the programs getting better than us, what happens when programs function well enough to be profitable replacements for having people do such things?
This isn’t solely about increased unemployment with all its devastating consequences. That is worrisome enough, but an important part of what makes humans human is to engage in creative work. Will the realm of available creative work be narrowed by AI so that only a few geniuses will be able to do it once AI is doing most writing, therapy, composing, agenda setting, etc.? Is it wrong to think that in that case what humans would be pushed aside from could leave humans less human?
The Op Ed argues that AI now does and maybe always will do human-identified things fundamentally differently than humans do them. But does that imply, as we think many Times readers will think it does, that AIs won’t do such things as well or even better than most or perhaps even all humans. Will AIs be able to simulate human emotions and all-important human authenticity into songs and paintings they make? Maybe not, but even if we ignore the possibility of AIs being explicitly used for ill, don’t the above observations raise highly consequential and even urgent questions? Should we be pursuing AI at our current breakneck pace?
Of course, when AIs are used to deceive and manipulate, to commit fraud, to spy, to hack, and to kill, among other nefarious possibilities, so much the worse. Not to mention, if AIs become autonomous with those anti-social agendas. Even without watching professors tell of AI’s already passing graduate level examinations, even without watching programmers tell of AIs already outputting code faster and more accurately than they and their programmer friends can, and even without watching AIs already audibly converse with their engineers about anything at all including even their “feelings” and “motives”, it ought to be clear that AI can have very powerful social implications even as its methods shed zero light on how humans function.
Another observation of the Times Op Ed is that AIs of the current sort have nothing like a human moral faculty. True, but does that imply they cannot have morally guided results? We would bet, instead, that AI programs can and in many cases already do incorporate moral rules and norms. That is why poor populations are being exploited financially and psychologically to label countless examples of porn as porn—exploitative immorality in service of what, morality or just phony propriety? The problem is, who determines what AI-embedded moral codes will promote and hinder? In current AIs, such a code will either be programmed in or learned by training on human examples. If programmed in, who will decide its content? If learned from examples, who will choose the examples? So the issue isn’t that AI inevitably has no morality. The issue is that AI can have bad morality and perpetuate biases such as racism, sexism, or classism learned from either programmers or training examples.
Even regarding a language faculty, as the Op Ed indicates certainly there is not one like ours in current AI. But is ours the only kind of faculty that can sustain language use? Whether the human language faculty emerged from a million years of slow evolution like most who hear about this stuff think linguists must believe, or it emerged overwhelmingly over a very short duration from a lucky mutation and then underwent only quite modest further evolution while it spread widely, as Chomsky compellingly argues, it certainly exists. And it certainly is fundamental to human language. But why isn’t the fully trained neural network of an AI a language faculty, albeit one different from ours? It generates original text. It answers queries. It is grammatical. Before long (if not already) it will converse better than most humans. It can even do all this in diverse styles. Answer my query about quantum mechanics or market competition, please. Answer like Hemingway. Answer like Faulkner. Egad, answer like Dylan. So why isn’t it a language faculty too—albeit unlike the human one and produced not by extended evolution or by rapid luck, but by training a neural network language model?
It is true that current AI can work with human languages and also, supposing there was sufficient data to train it, with languages the human faculty can not understand. It is also true that after training, an AI can in some respects do things the human language faculty wouldn’t permit. But why does being able to work with nonhuman languages mean that such a faculty must be impoverished regarding what it can do with human languages? The AI’s language faculty isn’t an infinitely malleable, useless blank slate. It can’t work with any language it isn’t trained on. Indeed, the untrained neural network can’t converse in a human language or in a non-human language. Once trained, however, does its different flexibility about what it makes possible and what it excludes make it not a language faculty? Or does its different flexibility just make it not a human-type language faculty? And does it even matter for social as opposed to scientific concerns?
Likewise, isn’t an AI faculty that can look at scenes and discern and describe what’s in them and can even identify what is there but is out of place being there, and that can do so as accurately as people, or even more accurately, a visual faculty, though again, certainly not the same as a human visual faculty?
And likewise for a drawing faculty that draws, a calculating faculty that calculates, and so on. For sure, despite taking inspiration from human experiences and evidence, such as AI programmers have done, none of these AI faculties are much like the human versions. They do not do what they do the way we humans do what we do. But unless we want to say that the contingent, historically lucky human ways of information processing are the only ways of information processing that can handle language as intelligently as humans can, and are the only ways of information processing that can not only produce and predict but also explain, we don’t see why true observations that current AI teaches us nothing about how humans operate imply that current AI can’t in two or five, or ten or twenty years—be indistinguishable from human intelligence, albeit derived differently than human intelligence.
More, what even counts as intelligence? What counts as creativity and providing explanations? What counts as understanding? Looking at current reports, videos, etc., even if there is a whole lot of profit-seeking hype in them, as we are sure is the case, we think AI programs in some domains (for example playing complex games, protein folding, and finding patterns in masses of data) already do better than humans who are best at such pursuits, and already do better than most humans, in many more domains.
For example, how many people can produce art work better than current AIs? We sure can’t. How many artists can do so even today, much less a year from now? A brilliant friend just yesterday told of having to write a complex letter for his work. He asked chatGPT to do it. In a long eye blink he had it. He said it was flawless and he admitted it was better than he would have produced. And this was so despite that he has written hundreds of letters. Is this no more socially concerning than when decades ago people first used a camera, a word processor, a spreadsheet, or a spell checker? Is this just another example of technology making some tasks easier? Do AIs that already do a whole lot of tasks previously thought to be purely human count as evidence that AIs can do that much and likely much more? Or, oddly, does what they do count as evidence that they will never do that much or more?
We worry that to dismiss the importance of current AIs because they don’t embody human mechanisms risks obscuring that AI is already having widespread social impact that ought to concern us for practical, psychological, and perhaps security reasons. We worry that such dismissals may imply AIs don’t need very substantial regulation. We have had effective moratoriums on human cloning, among other uses of technology. The window for regulating AI, however, is closing fast. We worry that the task at hand isn’t so much to dispel exaggerated hype about AI as it is to acknowledge AI’s growing capacities and understand not only its potential benefits but also its imminent and longer run dangers so we can conceive how to effectively regulate it. We worry that the really pressing regulatory task could be undermined by calling what is occurring “superficial and dubious” or “hi tech plagiarism” so as to counter hype.
Is intelligent regulation urgent? To us, it seems obvious it is. And are we instead seeing breakneck advance? To us, it seems obvious we are. Human ingenuity can generate great leaps that appear like magic and even auger seeming miracles. Un-opposed capitalism can turn even great leaps into pain and horror. To avoid that, we need thought and activism that wins regulations.
Technologies like ChatGPT don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist within societies and their defining political, economic, community, and kinship institutions.
The US is in the midst of a mental health crisis with virtually every mental health red flag metric off-the-charts: Suicides and ‘deaths of despair’ are at historic levels. Alienation, stress, anxiety, and loneliness are rampant. According to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America, the primary drivers of our breakdown are systemic: economic anxiety, systemic oppressions, alienation from our political, economic, and societal institutions. Capitalism atomizes us. It then commodifies meaningful connections into meaninglessness.
Social Media algorithms calculate the right hit that never truly satisfies. They keep us reaching for more. In the same way that Social Media is engineered to elicit addiction through user-generated content, language model AI has the potential to be far more addicting, and damaging. Particularly for vulnerable populations, AI can be fine-tuned to learn and exploit each person’s vulnerabilities—generating content and even presentation style specifically to hook users in.
In a society with rampant alienation, AI can exploit our need for connection. Imagine millions tied into AI subscription services desperate for connection. Profit motive will incentivize AI companies to not just lure more and more users, but to keep them coming back.
Once tied in, the potential for misinformation & propagandization greatly exceeds even social media. If AI replaces human labor in human defining fields, what then is left of “being human”? Waiting for AI guidance? Waiting for AI orders?
Clarity about what to do can only emerge from further understanding what is happening. But even after a few months of AI experiences, suggestions for minimal regulations seem pretty easy to come by. For example:
Legislate that all AI software & algorithms that have public impact must be Open Sourced allowing for their source code to be audited by the public.
Establish a new regulatory body, similar to the FDA, for public impact software.
Legislate that all AI-generated content, whether voice, chat, image, video, etc., must include a clearly visible/audible, standardized watermark/voicemark stating that the content was generated by AI, that the user has to acknowledge.
Legislate that all AI generated content provide a list of all specific sources used/learned to generate that particular content, including weights.
Legislate that any firm, organization, or individuals creating and distributing intentionally misleading and/or manipulative false AI created content be subject to severe penalties.
Legislate that no corporation, public or private, can replace workers with AI unless the government okays the step as being consistent with human priorities (not just profit seeking), the workforce of the workplace votes in favor of the change as being consistent with workforce conditions and desires (and not just profit seeking), and the replaced workers continue to receive their current salary from their old firm until they are employed at a new firm.
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