Visions from Two Theories

Beware of “monstrous moral hybrids” — a TIMN perspective

2012-01-18T10:42:00.000-08:00

In preparing for Part IV of this blog’s ongoing series on the Occupy protests, I’ve realized that something should be said about “monstrous moral hybrids” as organizations that will surely impede the kinds of democratic reforms that protesters may wish for. So I do not have to say too much in that future post, this post provides extended background. It also follows up on a previous post that expressed doubts about the trendy popularity of hybrid forms of organization.

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As noted in the Part-I post on the protest movements, the two “winningest” systems of the 20th century were patrimonial corporatism and liberal democracy. The former prevailed in the less-developed regions of the world, the latter in the more-advanced.

Lately, both systems have become fraught with decay and distortion in many nations. Once-functional exemplars of patrimonial corporatism — like Egypt — were increasingly rigged to serve clannish ruling elites. And systems exemplifying liberal democracy — notably, the USA — increasingly reverted to their own versions of patrimonial corporatism. That’s partly why so many protest movements — Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, etc. — have sprung up around the world, demanding democratic reforms.

Looking ahead from a TIMN perspective, it appears that a major obstacle to reforming such systems — obliging patrimonial-corporatist regimes to head anew toward democratization, and reversing patrimonial-corporatist back-sliding among the liberal democracies — will be dealing with the entrenched entities and practices that Jane Jacobs calls “monstrous moral hybrids”.

TIMN, as I’ve elaborated before (e.g., here and here), instructs that the four cardinal forms of organization — tribes, institutions, markets, networks — and their realms should be kept basically separate, in balance, and within limits as a society advances. Some mingling is inevitable and worthwhile, say in the way that staff camaraderie can spur a corporation’s marketing, or that public-private partnerships may facilitate development projects. But, as a rule, TIMN warns against fusions that result in enormous rigid hybrids of the forms. And elsewhere no one has warned against this better than Jane Jacobs.

Jane Jacobs’ concept of “monstrous moral hybrids”

In her marvelous Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992), Jane Jacobs lays out the “guardian moral syndrome” and the “commercial moral syndrome” as the two key moral / ethical “systems of survival” that lie behind successful social evolution. For each syndrome, she specifies fifteen precepts that define an optimal code of behavior for operating in that syndrome. The two sets of precepts are very different, even contradictory.

Here’s a layout taken from her book (p. 215; also pp. 23-24), as depicted at Wikipedia (source):

Her view tracks well with TIMN, for her guardian and commercial syndromes correspond roughly to TIMN’s institutional and market forms. She refers to practices that correspond to TIMN’s tribal form, but she does not separate them out, instead treating such practices as aspects of one or the other of the two syndromes. In the chart above, the guardian syndrome includes some precepts (e.g., about honor, vengeance) that pertain more to TIMN’s tribal form, while others (e.g., about hierarchy) fit with TIMN’s institutional form. Indeed, her guardian model sometimes seems more (T) tribal than (+I) administrative in nature, but for now I’ll stick with her intent: that it represents the underpinning of government.

Overall, and much like TIMN, she emphasizes that these two syndromes serve best when kept separate. As one of Jacobs’ protagonists explains:

“… It’s bootless to try to harmonize commerce and guardianship into one joint system of morality. Trying to do it can’t produce harmony — quite the opposite. The contradictions are innate. We have no way to escape them.

“To seek harmony in the sense of oneness is a profoundly false lead. But harmony can be sought by seeking to maintain each syndrome’s own identity and integrity. Then the two can support and complement each other, as I tried to show when I explained why commerce needs the support and help of guardians and why guardians need the support and help of commerce. Symbiosis: from the Greek for ‘together’ and ‘living.’ As the dictionary tells us, it means ‘the living together of two dissimilar organisms, especially when the association is mutually beneficial.’” (pp. 106-107)

But, while symbiosis is good, and while an actor may move back and forth between the two syndromes, cross-mixing is bad. If the two syndromes get mingled together improperly, the results are problematic hybrids that Jacobs calls “monstrous moral hybrids” (Chs. 5, 6, 9):

“These are examples of behavior that conforms neither to the intact guardian syndrome, nor the intact commercial syndrome. This is behavior that picks and chooses precepts from both syndromes, creating monstrous moral hybrids.” (p.80)

“You can’t mix up such contradictory moral syndromes without opening up moral abysses and producing all kinds of functional messes.” (p. 81)

Most of her examples are dark: like Nazi physicians and Soviet psychiatrists who should have aided their patients but instead served the state; violent crime syndicates that traffic in drugs, arms, or other illicit goods; police agencies that profiteer from false arrests; and media businesses that prop up dictators by censoring artists and journalists. By implication, totalitarian regimes are prone to monstrous moral hybrids. But liberal democracies may generate them too. She points to corrupt aspects of the military-industrial complex, though she never explicitly calls it a monstrous hybrid. In a later book — Dark Age Ahead (2005, p. 189) — she views privately-run jails and prisons in Canada and the United States as monstrous moral hybrids that have resulted from efforts to “reinvent government”.

I like Jacobs’ concept. It fits well with TIMN, and calls attention to some downsides and dark sides that may crop up as societies evolve. The next two sections show how her concept illuminates recent tendencies in both patrimonial-corporatist and liberal-democratic systems.

Monstrous moral hybrids as bastions of patrimonial corporatism

Enormous efforts go into creating monstrous moral hybrids, and then into protecting and preserving them. And many turn into bastions of patrimonial corporatism. Indeed, the creation of such hybrid entities is a key enabler of patrimonial corporatism, for one of its functions is power through patronage.

Exemplars of such hybrids are most noticeable in patrimonial-corporatist systems where government-sanctioned military enterprises have acquired vast commercial operations. This is the case in two of the societies hit by the recent wave of protest movements: Iran and Egypt.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG), exemplifies a monstrous moral hybrid. It was founded in order to consolidate various paramilitary forces after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Today, it has not only its own ground, naval, air, and special forces, but has also expanded economically and acquired assets to become a multi-billion business enterprise. Its business activities range from public construction projects to dentistry and travel agencies, not to mention black-market smuggling. In areas where it operates, it can shut out private competition; underbid and overrun; and use military conscripts as well as recruits for labor. Thus, in TIMN terms, it amounts to a hybrid tribal-institutional-market organization. It is sometimes said to amount to a state within a state, but it seems more than that to me — more like a proto-caliphate (or quasi-emirate) within a nation-state. (source source source source)

Egypt’s military is also said to be like a state within a state, since its commercial enterprises penetrate so many areas of industry, agriculture, real estate, and construction. Its economic roles commenced decades ago, rationalized as a way to spur efficient state-led development. But the enormous expansion that now exists followed from the 1975 peace agreement with Israel, for it led to a need to create thousands of new jobs for demobilized soldiers. (source)

“The answer was the military would also produce for the civilian market. Thus the generals came to preside over 16 enormous factories that turn out not just weapons, but an array of domestic products from dishwashers to heaters, clothing, doors, stationary pharmaceutical products, and microscopes. Most of these products are sold to military personnel through discount military stores, but large amount are also sold commercially.” (source)

“There is a great deal of speculation concerning how much of the Egyptian economy the military truly controls, with estimates ranging from 5 to 40 percent. But it is known that the economic assets of the military include industrial enterprises, construction companies, Red Sea resorts, and, probably most importantly, vast tracts of land, in addition to the more traditional industrial enterprises that have long been in military hands.” (source)

Again, as in Iran, this has resulted in cooperative, competitive, and even adversarial relations with private-sector businesses. It also has made labor relations a sore point, as have military exemptions from paying taxes and duties. Says one source cited above, “Many civilian businessmen complain that competing with the military is like trying to compete with the Mafia.”

The Iranian and Egyptian cases underscore that huge military-commercial hybrids reinforce a society’s tendencies toward patrimonial corporatism and pose severe obstacles to market-like democratization. The presence of such hybrids distorts entrepreneurial and employment opportunities, creating resentments and grievances across all classes. In addition, their presence constrains a central government’s capacity for initiating reforms.

In other societies affected by the Arab Spring — Tunisia, Libya, Syria — such hybrids have congealed around ruling family and tribe members rather than formal military offices. But these kinds of hybrids still mix Jacobs’ guardian and commercial syndromes in ways that qualify them as monstrous moral hybrids, for their commercial roles are often enforced by paramilitary forces tied to the family and tribe members.

Elsewhere, China’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) once commanded such enormous commercial holdings and activities that it was dubbed “PLA Inc.” But in the 1990s China’s government and party leaders called a halt to this practice, and obliged the army to spin off its holdings to the private sector (often to the benefit of retired officers). This helped to reduce corruption, reassure institutional loyalty, and improve the army’s focus on readiness and professionalization. I can’t say that the disbanding of this monstrous moral hybrid helps explain why China has adopted the market form better than have Iran or Egypt, or whether it removed a potential cause for protests. But at least this case shows that disbanding is possible when top leadership orders it.

Monstrous moral hybrids in liberal democracies

It seems natural for patrimonial-corporatist regimes to create at least some monstrous moral hybrids, in part because they are so useful as patronage networks. But it seems unnatural for liberal democracies to do so. And yet they do so. Perhaps it’s because they are have old patrimonial-corporatist remnants embedded deep within them, and thus are prone to occasional reversions, as circumstances permit. Perhaps the “iron law of oligarchy” should have a corollary “iron law of hybridity”?

Even so, the advanced liberal democracies in Europe, North America, and elsewhere don’t have military-commercial entities like those noted above. A case may be made that some democracies have cognates in their military-industrial complexes, and lately especially in military subcontractor systems that have firms like Blackwater. Also, as noted above, Jacobs would include America’s prison-industrial complex in her list. But what seem more interesting in the liberal democracies are hybrids in areas outside of military, law-enforcement, and other armed “guardian” circles.

To help identify monstrous moral hybrids where guardianship is not explicitly tied to armed force, I’d dissect Jacobs’ guardian syndrome into TIMN’s tribal and institutional forms (even make them “syndromes”). By tribal, I basically mean patrimonial in this context; for patrimonialism, with its penchant for relying on crony patronage networks, amounts to an advanced iteration of tribalism. And then, with that modification of Jacobs’ framework in mind, I’d go look for huge hybrids that fuse tribal with governmental and commercial purposes.

The best exemplars I’ve spotted are the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Conservative economists have long criticized them; and thus perhaps it should not come as a surprise that one — Mark Calabria (Cato Institute) — even relates them to Jacobs’ concept:

“I repeatedly watched, while working in the Senate, Fannie/Freddie invoke their “private” nature in order to avoid regulation while invoking their “public” nature to gain protection and privilege. The result was little accountability from either the market or the government (our largest banks currently enjoy a smaller version). Of course, one of the primary differences in debates over financial regulation is the degree to which one believes that either the market or government provides accountability. Setting aside those debates, we should all be able to agree that companies should be either private or government. That the mixing of the two, government sponsored enterprises, is a recipe for avoiding accountability and transparency. But then I suspect that might have been the intent all along. Monstrous moral hybrids by design.” (source)

But criticisms emanate from liberal-leaning sources as well. Here’s what Adam Posen (Petersen Institute for International Economics) says, albeit without invoking Jacobs’ concept:

For automobiles, hybrid engines are a huge advance. For financial institutions, hybrids are the worst possible design. By financial hybrids, I mean institutions that are neither wholly public-sector bureaus nor private-sector companies. …

Thus, it is no coincidence that the most spectacular crashes of the recent financial turmoil involved the hybrids on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, it was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; in Germany, it was Sachsen LB and IKB. In both countries, these neither-fish-nor-fowl institutions were long recognized as financial accidents waiting to happen. … But their political utility kept them open: …

Of course, the basic technical purposes of these financial hybrids had some merit. … [But] once they were set up as hybrids, the political incentives for the institutions' managers and political patrons got these questionable institutions into businesses they had no business being in and that were ancillary to these more limited positive purposes. …

… The common point for both sides of the Atlantic is that if these institutions cease to be hybrid, it will be natural for their existence to depend upon their utility in serving their core mission, rather than on their political support and threat of failure.” (source)

Much as I might like to think that these GSEs serve noble causes by using public-private partnerships to ease economic hardships and spread home ownership, it seems now that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, following their enormous expansions during the Bush (Sr.) and Clinton administrations, have served an elitist kind of patrimonial corporatism that has extended deep into Wall Street and Capitol Hill, entangling Democrat and Republican leaders along with bankers and other financiers who oscillate between high offices in New York and Washington. (example)

Lest anyone think I’m being biased in criticizing a huge hybrid that many liberals have touted, here’s something else to think about: How about Fox News as a monstrous moral hybrid? It’s a commercial enterprise that has sought to tribalize its market on behalf of leaders in the Republican party; it embodies the spread of patrimonial corporatism in the United States more than any other media enterprise I can think of. In addition, what about “K Street”? The NCAA? Some public-sector unions? Are there grounds for viewing them as monstrous moral hybrids as well? In keeping a lookout for hybrids serving patrimonial corporatism in democracies elsewhere around the world, I’ve also begun to wonder about Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

Worth disbanding, but so difficult

Much as I appreciate Jacobs’ concept, it’s not entirely clear. I can’t tell exactly what is or is not a monstrous moral hybrid, why immoral doesn’t figure along with moral in her write-up, and what kinds of hybrids, if any, may be acceptable, even beneficial. Surely not all mixed public-private endeavors, nor all efforts at government outsourcing to private enterprise, should be automatically suspect — yet the criteria are unclear.

Even so, her concept fits well with TIMN, and is better — more insightful and illuminating — than anything else I’ve seen or come up with in this regard. It identifies a significant organizational distortion in dramatic terms. It would suit TIMN even better if she had posited more than two syndromes, particularly by splitting out something like a tribal one, as I indicated above.

By implication, it would be advisable to disband all monstrous moral hybrids. But that seems too much to hope for. They serve too many purposes and powers to be easily undone. They are conducive to patrimonial corporatism, and regressive for liberal democracy. In hindsight, a good way to backslide or at least muddle a liberal democracy is to create such hybrids; for that can generate patrimonial-corporatist pockets of power, profit, and privilege that help co-opt and compromise myriad economic, political, and other actors.

But who is to take the lead in calling for a disbanding of these enormities? Strategy is the art of positioning, and such intricate hybrids are created for strategic positioning purposes in the first place. Undoing them implies repositionings of a grand order.

Perhaps Arab-Spring, Occupy, or other protesters ought to insist on their disbanding. But I have doubts. Though advisable, it could get complicated and divisive (even risky in places like Egypt) if protesters were to push hard on this. The Tea Party movement tried a bit, but to no effect I can see.

Better yet would be if the top leaders of societies distorted by these hybrids were to disband them on their own enlightened initiative. The regimes that have incurred large protests, and fielded great resistance to them, all have monstrous moral hybrids not far from their cores. While objecting specifically to them has figured only marginally in protest movements in a few nations, disbanding them would maneuver the regimes and their systems back onto optimal TIMN paths. Nonetheless, it’s easier to imagine reasons why regime leaders wouldn’t take such initiatives than why they might. And that applies to both patrimonial-corporatist and liberal-democratic governments.

That’s a sour note on which to end this post. But there are hopeful notes yet to be played. The prospects for doing something about monstrous moral hybrids may improve as societies continue to evolve from representative democracy to “monitory democracy” — the topic of the next post.

What the Occupy Protests Mean: A TIMN Interpretation (Part III) — A Digression about Space-Time-Action (STA) Orientations

2011-12-27T09:31:00.000-08:00

What’s here is Part III of what has evolved into a multi-part post about the Occupy movements. Combined, the parts address the causes (Part I, newly amended today), conduct (Part II), cognition (Part III), and consequences (Part IV? [pending]) of the Occupy protests. Most of the posts are done from a TIMN perspective about social evolution. But this one digresses.

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Part III: On Cognitive Aspects of the Occupy Protest Movements

While preparing the other posts for this series, I was surprised to see so many writings that emphasized “space” and spatial metaphors — e.g., what it means to occupy a space, make connections, avoid being put in a box, etc. And this was in addition to the usual observations about how the new information and communications technologies alter people’s sense of space (and time).

These writings about spatial orientations represent an innovative turn in theory and rhetoric. They relate to points in Part II about the conduct of the Occupy movement; but they don’t fit easily into that post. It’s done from a TIMN perspective. Instead, these writings relate more to this blog’s other focus: how space-time-action (STA) orientations affect people’s mindsets and behaviors. So, I’ve opted to do this separate STA-related post, and put in its Addendum a large set of readings about spatial orientations by Occupy activists and observers. At the end, I return the focus back to TIMN.

Brief recapitulation about the space-time-action (STA) framework

I’ve not posted about the “STA” (space-time-action cognitive knowledge) framework for quite some time. So here are a couple pages of background. (Readers who want more background can go here and here.)

Imagine all kinds of people with all kinds of beliefs. Next, imagine stripping away their high-level ideologies, values, and norms, until you get down to their most basic notions that still amount to thoughtful cognition about how the world looks and works. Stop there, before descending into a quivering mess of raw emotions, impulses, and instincts.

What's there, I contend, is a layer or module in the mind that consists of people's basic orientations — basic assumptions — about space, time, and action. Briefly, by space I refer to how people see their identity in relation to others, and how they perceive objects as being structured, arrayed, and linked. By time, I refer to how people discern past, present, and future. By action, I mean whether and how people think they can affect matters by means of action, i.e., cause and effect. People’s minds operate through their views about social space, time, and action — about where one is located in space, where time is headed, and what, if anything, one can do about it. And this is so despite the broader ideologies, religions, values, and norms that people hold.

All three orientations — toward space, time, and action — are essential for the mind to work in ways that represent social consciousness. A module consisting of the triplex takes shape in childhood; indeed, the development of these orientations lies at the core of a person’s early consciousness of the world. The module is further molded by a person’s particular environment and experiences, and by the culture and era in which one lives. As these space-time-action orientations take hold, they affect what people think and do, because most — all? — that people think and do must pass through and be processed in this module. No mind works well without it. It is requisite cognitive knowledge; STA orientations function at the core of much — all? — human awareness and deliberation.

Furthermore, STA lies behind not only how individuals think, but also how cultures work and historical eras differ. STA assumptions and beliefs affect every mindset in every culture in every era; no mindset, culture, or era can be analyzed fully without inquiring into all three. Some major ideas — like the epochal shift from believing in fate, to believing in progress — owe to shifts in the underlying beliefs that end up in this module. Civilizations are defined in part by how they mold people’s minds in terms of these three domains of cognitive knowledge.

Thus the space-time-action module plays a key role in shaping why people end up believing and behaving in all the moral and mean ways they do. The layer functions rather independently of people’s philosophical and ideological values, yet it may also influence the shape of those values — influences run in both directions. Indeed, changes in this module may precede, or occur at the same time as, changes in those avowed values. Change people’s STA orientations, and a lot else they believe may also change — and vice-versa.

In sum, learn about people’s STA orientations, and you learn about the core of their mindsets. Change their STA orientations, and you may change their minds. A battle of narratives — whose story wins — may turn as much on their STA elements as on their other ingredients.

Occupy writings from an STA perspective

Occupy activists have generated an unusual spate of writings using the concept of “space” — what it means to occupy and fight for a space, to penetrate physical vs. virtual spaces, to create and hold sacred spaces, to convert private into public spaces and both into common spaces, or even into “temporary autonomous zones” (TAZs). The activists’ emphasis on spatial notions also appears in referents, often metaphorical, to overcoming barriers, avoiding being put in a box, making connections, opening avenues, building bridges, disrupting capitalist webs, and upholding the dignity of the individual, yet keeping identity obscure. And of course, much is made of how the new information and communications technologies alter the nature of space (and time) — an old theme that I’ll barely attend to here.

I’ve never before seen a social struggle generate so much activity around the concept of space. Language about space — about spatial analysis and spatial struggle — has cropped up to a degree I used to see for language about class, class analysis, and class struggle. In some respects, spatial analysis has superseded class analysis (especially when “class” is viewed as a kind of “space”). As I recall, neither of the seminal struggles of the 1990s — the Zapatista movement in Mexico, and the Battle of Seattle — led to much writing in spatial terms. I may have missed other social struggles in the interim, but even so, the Occupy movement appears to have stimulated an unprecedented amount of writings about spatial orientations.

Anthropologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists have long taken an interest in studying people’s spatial orientations; but the so-called “spatial turn” in postmodern philosophy, sociology, and social and literary theory began just a couple decades ago. Since I remain keenly interested in spatial (not to mention time and action) orientations, I have amassed a lot of this postmodern analysis. I am still far behind in going through it; yet, while I marvel at how illuminating some of it is, my impression is that it also offers some of the most opaque, jargony, even incomprehensible writing I’ve seen. And I’m not alone in thinking so (here’s a sympathetic parody). I’ve also noticed that most of the writers lean quite Left — many admire anarchism — and seem to be searching for theoretical optics with which to transcend Marxism, particularly since communism and socialism broke so badly in the 1980s.

I note this not because I’m about to cast aspersions on the Occupy-related writings. Quite the contrary. I note it because, while they do extend that spatial turn in postmodern analysis, the readings I’ve encountered are surprisingly clear and precise, well-written (see the Addendum). I don’t know why, but I sense that it’s because the Occupy writings treat space more as a strategic and tactical matter than as an academic matter.

What follows is a sketchy mash-up of points culled — even lifted verbatim —from the writings in the Addendum. After highlighting their spatial aspects, with a bit of attention to their time and action aspects, I end with a tentative insight that cycles back to TIMN — the main thread in this series of posts.

Space orientations in Occupy writings

The Occupy writings show that a struggle for space is underway, and advise thinking in terms of a multiplicity of spaces: not only physical spaces, but also symbolic, mental, meme, virtual, and media spaces. They are viewed as connected, interwoven — the physical occupations acting as metaphorical anchors for the virtual ones, and vice-versa.

The writings also advise thinking in terms of networks more than nodes. An Occupy locale becomes a territorial node embedded in a “deterritorialised network” — one that consists of myriad “nodes of resonance”, rhizomatically connected. It’s all about being horizontal, not vertical; about not having a hierarchy or leader; about creating one’s own mode of governance, without recognizing outside authority, even excluding it.

Postmodern theorists like to talk about the “production of space”; and these writings reflect that tendency. The protesters are creating new spaces for assembly, spreading connections, resisting enclosure — they’re getting to feel part of something big that is getting bigger. By avoiding making specific demands, they open up space for new entrants, and prevent being put in boxes by outsiders. One writer adds that what’s being produced is not only space but also “presence” — leading to a concept of “the global street” as a new kind of territory.

Much is said about struggling to affect private and public spaces. About the distinctions between them. About converting public and private spaces into common spaces. Indeed, about reclaiming the commons, and creating new spaces of autonomy within the capitalist system, even if only “temporary autonomous zones” (TAZs). One writer proposes thinking “of revolution in terms of a multiplicity of insurrectional and autonomous spaces.”

For some writers, what’s significant about Occupy is the creation of sacred spaces — ones that lie outside ordinary place and time, that correspond to “storied place” and “storied flow” (perhaps a “church of dissent”). Claims are made that capitalism profanes much that is sacred, and sacralizes much that is profane — or, in another sense, capitalism is said to de-sacralize all it touches. People have lost a sense of the sacred, and they want a return to it. Occupy can help resolve this, by treating civic space as sacred space.

At the same time, some writers caution against fetishizing a space, even a sacred space. They remind their fellow activists that specific sites are not the prize — that if they get stuck trying to hold a site, it can distract from the big picture. A fluid mobility is deemed more important than trying to encamp permanently somewhere.

Thus Occupy isn’t just a protest movement; it’s an experiment, a prototype, a model, for creating new spaces — especially new “autonomous community zones” for fashioning and practicing alternative ways of living and governing, outside the approved structures of authority and hegemony that normally shape life. Occupy makes new kinds of connections possible — it enables people to find each other, to connect in ways that cannot be contained, and then to develop a collective intelligence. But, it’s said, the movement needs broadening and deepening — partly so it can continue its spatial endeavors to create cracks, break walls, isolate elites, and disrupt order in the system.

Time orientations in Occupy writings

Some writers criticize what they regard as an excessive focus on space. It’s pointed out that time may be more decisive. Occupiers should be thinking and acting in terms of time as well as space — they need to occupy time as well as space. Indeed, the goal of occupying spaces for extended periods means that Occupy is inherently a temporal as well as spatial concept. In addition, a focus on occupying time seems like it would allow for more fluid strategies and tactics.

Yet, I haven’t found much elaboration about any of this. Far less is written about time than about spatial orientations. But interesting points are made: that Occupy is creating disruptions, critical junctures, and psychic breaks; that it’s important to stake a claim to the future; that battles may unfold to determine whether the past wins or the future does. Most Occupy writers believe that a long struggle lies ahead; but only a few write in millenarian or apocalyptic terms.

Action orientations in Occupy writings

This post is based on my noticing extensive references to space and spatial referents in the Occupy-related writings, plus a little about time orientations. The writings also contain lots of points that might fit under the heading of action orientations. Say, for example, when references are made to “direct action” as a body of theory and practice that appeals to anarchists. Or when interviews show people expressing support for Occupy because they feel they’ve lost control of their lives. But in my reading of the Occupy-related writings, STA’s action aspect is not a key optic or language; what’s there is processed through, or fits alongside, the materials about space and time orientations.

Even so, there is one action orientation — nonviolence — that is extremely important all by itself as a valued way to affect the world. I could imagine drastic alterations in the space and time orientations discussed above, and the content of this particular action orientation would still remain the same.

Manifestations of the full STA triplex in Occupy writings

While the emphasis in the Occupy writings is on spatial orientations, the full STA triplex — space + time + action — is manifest in several major themes:

In the reliance on new information and communications technologies, which are so renowned for enabling people to compress and conquer space and time, and to increase their efficacy (an action orientation).

In the effort to foster collective intelligence, as a new way of thinking, collaborating, and achieving consensus, not only at on-site assemblies but also across the broader background network.

In the attraction to swarming, as a network-based strategy and set of tactics for social struggle that is different from the hierarchy-based strategies and tactics used by mass movements of yore.

These themes — advanced comms, collective intelligence, social swarming — are, of course, interrelated and interdependent, made possible largely by the technological advances, as discussed (swarming especially) in Part II.

Speculation: autonomists vs. communitarians vs. new sectorists?

With this post, I initially intended just to make a few observations about the importance of spatial perspectives in the Occupy-related writings, and to convey the set of interesting readings I’ve compiled. But along the way, I’ve ended up discerning three schools of spatial radicalism that seem to be vying for the future: autonomists, communitarians, and new sectorists. To varying degrees, all their adherents who’ve shown up in the Occupy protests disapprove of “the system” and believe it is headed for collapse. All seek radical transformations. All feel a renaissance of the Left may be at hand. And many subscribe to an emerging pro-commons ideology: commonism. But, despite such overlaps, each upholds a somewhat different approach to space and society.

I’m not saying these are the major schools reflected in the Occupy-related writings. The Occupy movement is such a mixture — even a motley hodge-podge — of ideological and other tendencies that it’s not clear which may be the central or cutting-edge ones. But these three schools of thought appear to be the ones that revolve the most around spatial language. And being able to discuss, dissect, and debate in that language appears to be playing important, even empowering and decisive roles in the Occupy movement.

My unexpected deduction — that these schools of spatial radicalism exist and will increasingly vie with each other — is tentative and speculative. But I’m interested in trying it out; for if it is sensible, it helps switch from this post’s focus on STA back to TIMN, in preparation for Part IV of this series.

The autonomists — and I gather that’s an established term — have a long tradition, associated with anarchism. Of the three schools, the autonomists are the most pervasive in the Occupy movement. They also have variants among people in outside networks who subscribe to notions about “resilient communities” and “transition towns”. An aim is to create “zones of autonomy” — especially “autonomous community zones” — that are off-the-grid, independent of states and markets, self-managed and self-sufficient, and all networked together.

The communitarians — and that’s an established term, but it’s controversial enough that I’m not sure how well it applies here, or whether many activists would approve of my usage — are also intent on community development. But their emphasis is more on community rights than autonomy (see here for a Community Bill of Rights initiative related to the Occupy movement). They’d rather see communities interact and relate to the outside system, in socially responsible ways, than be radically independent of its influences.

The new sectorists — and that’s not an established term; it’s the best I could come up with while wondering about the matter — find both the autonomist and communitarian visions appealing, but their own vision is distinctive. Its focus is not the community but the sector level. They want a new sector — variously termed a third, social, or better yet, commons sector — to emerge and gain strength alongside the prevailing public and private sectors. They want societies radically transformed by the growth of this new space — the commons, especially the information / knowledge commons. The aim is not autonomous isolation, but integration around new principles of collaboration associated with the rise of the network form of organization. And the key actors in this vision are networked NGOs and social enterprises, more than communities. (See discussions in previous posts about Michel Bauwens’ P2P theory and its adherents, notably here.)

Of these three schools of spatial radicalism, the views of the new sectorists seem most in harmony with TIMN, the autonomists the least. From a TIMN perspective, the autonomists are not quadriformists; communitarians might be, some of them anyway; and the new sectorists may well be, and are likely to become more so. Autonomism looks mostly like an emphasis on the tribe and network forms, peppered with critiques of the hierarchy and market forms. Communitarianism — what I’ve read anyway — tends to be triformist par excellence. Its proponents aim to rectify and rebalance family, state, and market dynamics, especially at the community level. But while they may laud civil-society and some of its NGOs, they don’t fully recognize the network form and its implications, at least not to the extent that TIMN and P2P theory do. In contrast, the new sectorists — e.g., proponents of P2P theory — are well on their way to becoming quadriformists. They value the tribal form, accept states and markets (long as they’re reformed), and seek the rise of a networked civil society committed to commonism.

At present, these three schools of spatial radicalism overlap and coexist in the Occupy movement; they are allied and collaborating. What I am calling the new sectorists don’t even amount to a clear formation yet; many might prefer to identify as anarchists who seek autonomy in principle. But if/as the Occupy movement extends deep into next year, and if spatial language remains pivotal, then the distinctions among these three may get refined, even sharpened. I’m not predicting divisiveness — there are many other possibilities. Their mutual penchants for spatial language helps to sustain their bonds (and perhaps to guard against being co-opted by conventional actors, like political parties and labor unions, whose leaders are not used to such language). But a more fluid process seems likely for relations among the three schools, and perhaps a rebalancing, in which the capacity to out-compete depends on the capacity to out-collaborate, both vis à vis each other and in connection to outside networks. Autonomists have had the edge in encampments, where they generate much of the energy and momentum. But communitarians and new sectorists may have edges vis à vis the outside meta-networks of NGOs and other actors. As the spatial language goes, so may go the Occupy movement.

My own view, from a TIMN perspective, is that the prospects for moving into a quadriformist future depends on the new sectorists more than on the other two schools, in part because the new sectorists seem the most interested in monitory democracy, the autonomists the least. Or so I presume, and shall discuss further in Part IV.

* * * * *

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Sidebar #1: In focusing on the Occupy-related writings about space, I’ve barely attended lately to materials from protests elsewhere. But STA factors are significant all over, albeit in different ways. The Occupy writings discussed above are distinctive because of how much they reflect anarchism and postmodernism. That’s less the case elsewhere, but STA orientations are still crucial.

* One of the most important spatial referents elsewhere is the sense of personal dignity — from its absence leading up to a protest, to its recovery as a protest gets underway, through the role it may play as different forces contend for power later on. The Arab Spring is often portrayed as being mostly about democracy; yet, dignity has been an equal if not stronger motivation. (For elaboration, see Part I of this series on Occupy, plus my post at the ZenPundit blog.) And of course, connectivity is another major spatial theme everywhere, including for how it helps mobilize a sense of dignity.

* Time orientations figure as much as spatial ones. For example, in a recent discussion about the Arab Spring on CSPAN-2, Libyan activist Hisham Matar commented as follows: Under the dictator, people always knew what would happen next in their lives. But now, there is a wonderful new uncertainty, a feeling of being in charge of one’s own future. What’s changed, he says, is the collective imagination about the future. His comment radiates positive future orientations. In contrast, a recent report about the London riots [see the Addendum below] finds that rioters tended to be youth who lack hope and opportunity. Again, note the key role of future orientations, this time negative, in the analysis.

A deeper parsing of views from elsewhere would surely show a mix of space-time-action orientations. But in the examples I have at hand, the emphasis is on space and/or time.

Sidebar #2: Somewhere above I briefly observed that each of the TIMN forms is associated with a different set of STA orientations. Here’s a table that provides some clarification and elaboration (though I don’t think it helps much with this post):

Table: TIMN vis à vis STA

Note: This table is excepted from a larger table about TIMN. A related excerpt may be seen in an earlier post here.
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* * * * *

ADDENDUM: READINGS ABOUT SPACE-TIME-ACTION ORIENTATIONS

A collection of quotes, gleaned from browsing online write-ups about Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and related protests elsewhere. Inclusion does not mean approval, only that I sense a bearing on matters raised in the main text of this post.

This collection contains readings that relate to people’s space-time-action orientations (STA). For related readings about the Occupy protests from a TIMN perspective, see the Addendums to Part I, Part II, and Part IV [pending] in this series of posts.

Conduct of the protests: occupying and redefining space — Many of the readings seem to reflect the “spatial turn” in postmodern philosophy and sociology, as well as in anarchism. Almost all refer to the nature of “space” and/or contain spatial referents. A few address time and action orientations as well.

I’ve ended up with so many readings that, to make scanning easier, I’ve arranged them under thematic headings. The first bunch contains the most general statements about space. The next three bunches put the readings under headings that parallel those in the Addendum to Part II about the conduct of the Occupy protests. After them comes a bunch that speak to time and action as well as spatial orientations. Last is a set about online collections elsewhere. Overall, my arrangement of the readings is quite imprecise and impromptu; many could just as easily fit under another heading, or be moved back to Part II’s addendum, or even to Part I’s.

— On the general importance and varieties of “space” —

Patrick Bruner:

“This isn’t a protest. This is a way of making a new space. We have taken Liberty Square. We have renamed it, and we have rebuilt it into something that we believe is a better model. Maybe it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s not what we’ll come out of this with. But it’s a way to at least start a discussion, a real discussion, about all of the things that ail us on a daily basis, the things that are never really discussed.” (source)

Gaston Gordillo:

“… The node of resonance in New York has radiated its force in all directions and precipitated the emergence of a continental political movement whose spatial form is the rhizome: a de-centered, horizontal, multi-sited assemblage of myriad other nodes interconnected with each other and recognizing no authority other than the collective power generated by the nodes. …

“… Nodes of resonance, indeed, gather, animate, and organize parks and squares and reconfigure their materiality. But to say that a node has changed a “space” or a “place” gives us only a limited glimpse of this material transformation. These concepts prevent us from seeing that what changed is the form and affective pulsation of what I propose to call the terrain. This essay, inspired by the occupy movement, is my first attempt to outline the principles of a theory of the terrain, …

“… The rhizomic form of the occupy movement is most apparent in its leaderless and multi-centered spatial elasticity, which has been disrupted here and there but only momentarily and without disrupting the rhizomic whole. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines”; and these lines “always tie back to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 9).” (source)

Saul Newman:

“Is radical politics simply a disruption of the existing order of space, or does it invent its own alternative spatial imaginaries; and, if so, what are these imaginaries? What is the space of radical politics today? What spaces does it occupy, contest and imagine? …

“Rather, we might think of revolution in terms of a multiplicity of insurrectional and autonomous spaces. Indeed, this alternative mapping of the political space is what is implicit in the anarchist idea of the ‘social revolution’, in which Bakunin called upon people to ‘organize their powers apart from and against the state’ (1953: 377). If we try to think what this might mean today, it can only be the creation of autonomous spaces which are heterogeneous to the order of the state and capitalism. Creating and defending these spaces would no doubt involve moments of confrontation with the state – and we see this all the time, in the clashes between police and those who occupy workplaces and universities, or between the military and indigenous collectives – but the emphasis would mostly be on fostering alternative ways of life, new relations and intensities. These are what might be called insurrectional spaces, and they can be seen as so many cracks within the dominant social, political and economic order.” (source)

Sam Halvorsen:

“Autonomy can be broadly understood as a political struggle that rejects large, centralised and hierarchical structures tied to the nation-state and increasingly to multinational corporations, and simultaneously seeks to develop alternative political structures based on self-managed consensus (see Katsiaficas, 2007). Both resisting and creating, autonomous movements seek to be the change they want to see, and actively construct post-capitalist worlds in the present (see Gibson-Graham, 2006). This short vignette will focus on the recent popularisation of “occupations” within the UK anti-cuts movement, considering how autonomy has become one of their central tendencies and what spatialities they have been engaging with. …

“These two spatialities, of the territorialised place and the deterritorialised network, can support each other. Most occupations tend to rely on online networking to gain broad support and publicise their message. Moreover the space of the occupation can act as a useful meeting point for diverse networks to encounter each other and discuss strategy. The call to “occupy everything”, is rather a strategy of multiple simultaneous occupations, embedded in particular territories, but brought together through a wider network. …

“Secondly, occupations provide a very physical manifestation of the deterritorialised network. Movements need to root themselves in place from time to time, and build strong-tie relations in place to sustain their activities. Whilst some take the struggle for autonomy to the work-place (e.g. workers' cooperatives) or home (e.g. squats), there is an increasing desire to create spaces of autonomy within the heart of the capitalist system. By reterritorialising the struggle, in a very material way, occupations act as public experiments of post-capitalist worlds.” (source)

John Robb:

“… Over the last couple of months, Occupy had gone beyond a reliance on a specific place like Zuccotti. It developed a recipe for how to set up a temporary autonomous zone (what's often called a TAZ).

“What is a TAZ? A location that is outside of the control of the nation-state and global marketplace.” (source)

Nathan Jurgenson:

“ … As a protester simultaneously marching in physical space and documenting what you do online, you can watch the stream of activity by following hashtags on Twitter and see your tweet retweeted by someone else on the other end of the globe. You can post your photos to Facebook and watch the comments come in. Augmented by the Internet, what you are doing seems to matter more. This is the not-so-secret weapon of augmented revolution.

“I think this is part of the story for why we are currently living in this flammable atmosphere of mobilization that is growing around the globe (as well as the counter-movement of digital repression). Protest and rioting are all more possible, perhaps likely, because social media has united the power of both physical space and networked digitality.” (source)

Sarah Wanenchak:

“… It’s difficult to miss the profound interweaving and enmeshing of the physical and digital aspects of protest as we see it in both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street – the weight of the protests produced by the occupation of physical space by gathered human bodies, coupled with the constant documentation and nearly instantaneous sharing of images, video, and text that have chronicled these physical occupations and arguably helped them to grow – in short, the augmented nature of contemporary social action. …

“… Again, we can draw a direct comparison between this and the spread of civil unrest outward from Tunisia in the Arab Spring; when people saw the Tunisian regime fall in the face of massive popular protest, it expanded the boundaries of what they perceived to be possible. And once again, the spread of the news happened largely through digital means. …

“… The heartbeat of collective action has sped up. …

“So what does this mean for the future of social movements and geopolitics? If technology can help create unstable political situations – moments of “critical juncture” – and also enable events within those moments to move ever faster, it may be that critical junctures themselves will occur more quickly and more intensely, with a more rapid geographical spread. What remains to be seen is what can emerge from those moments of upheaval. While some of the uprisings of 1848 resulted in political change, none of them can be characterized as a truly successful social revolution. While movements in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt have all succeeded in bringing about varying degrees of regime change, the futures of Tunisia and Libya remain an open question, and Egypt has once more exploded into protest. The long-term impact of Occupy is yet to be decided.” (source)

Saskia Sassen:

“In each of these cases, I would argue that the street, the urban street, as public space is to be differentiated from the classic European notion of more ritualized spaces for public activity, with the piazza and the boulevard the emblematic European instances. I think of the space of “the street,” which of course includes squares and any available open space, as a rawer and less ritualized space. The Street is a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made, rather than a space for enacting ritualized routines. With some conceptual stretching, we might say that politically “street and square” are marked differently from “boulevard and piazza”: the first signals action, and the second, ritual.

“Seen this way, there is an epochal quality to the current wave of street protests, no matter their enormous differences, from the extraordinary courage and determination of protesters in Syria, to the flash crowds convoked via social media to invade commercial blocks in Chile, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to the unarmed Occupiers being tear-gassed, beaten, and arrested by militarized police forces across America. …

“… Today’s political practices, I would argue, have to do with the production of “presence” by those without power, a politics that claims rights to the city and to the state rather than protection of property. …

“… It is worth remembering last year’s student occupation on the campus of the University of Puerto Rico. It lasted for months, and the protestors were surrounded, literally, by the military. But they were not attacked, given the high visibility of the urban campus. And they had enough space to themselves to develop the elements of an alternative politics and way of life: they did urban agriculture and collective cooking, used environmentally sustainable practices, and made art and music. In brief, they strived to build a different society even while encircled by the state. And they eventually won several of their demands from the university administration. …

“Some of the key features of a broad range of struggles happening in the MENA region but also, with their own specific features, in places as diverse as cities in China, Israel, Chile, Greece, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States lead me to argue that the question of public space is central to giving the powerless rhetorical and operational openings. But this public space needs to be distinguished from the concept of public space in the European tradition. This brings me to the concept of the Global Street, a contrast to the piazza and the boulevard of the European tradition. And it calls attention to territory, a category flattened into one meaning—national territory—over the last century, which is now coming to life through occupations such as those of Tahrir Square and OWS.” (source)

Henry Giroux:

“But there is more. It is also crucial not to allow casino capitalism to transform higher education into another extension of the corporate and warfare state. If higher education loses its civic purpose and becomes simply an adjunct of corporate and military power, there will be practically no spaces left for dissent, dialogue, civic courage, and a spirit of thoughtfulness and critical engagement. This is all the more reason to occupy colleges and use them as a launching pad to both educate and to expand the very meaning of the public sphere. Knowledge is about more than the truth; it is also a weapon of change. The language of a radical politics needs more than hope and outrage; it needs institutional spaces to produce ideas, values, and social relations capable of fighting off those ideological and material forces of casino capitalism that are intent in sabotaging any viable notion of human interaction, community, solidarity, friendship, and justice. …

“Hopefully, the Occupy Wall Street movements will expand their appropriation of public space to the university. And if so, let's hope that higher education will be viewed as a crucial public good and democratic public sphere.” (source)

— On direct democracy in general assemblies at encampments —

David Graeber:

“… To adopt activist parlance: this wasn’t really a crowds of verticals—that is, the sort of people whose idea of political action is to march around with signs under the control of one or another top-down protest movement. They were mostly pretty obviously horizontals: people more sympathetic with anarchist principles of organization, non-hierarchical forms of direct democracy, and direct action. …

“We quickly decided that what we really wanted to do was something like had already been accomplished in Athens, Barcelona, or Madrid: occupy a public space to create a New York General Assembly, a body that could act as a model of genuine, direct democracy to contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as “democracy” by the US government. The Wall Street action would be a stepping-stone. …

“It’s no coincidence that the epicenter of the Wall Street Occupation, and so many others, is an impromptu library: a library being not only a model of an alternative economy, where lending is from a communal pool, at 0% interest, and the currency being leant is knowledge, and the means to understanding.” (source)

David Graeber:

“It is common wisdom among anarchists, autonomists, Situationists, and other new revolutionaries that the old breed of grim, determined, self-sacrificing revolutionary, who sees the world only in terms of suffering will ultimately only produce more suffering himself. Certainly that’s what has tended to happen in the past. Hence the emphasis on pleasure, carnival, on creating “temporary autonomous zones” where one can live as if one is already free.” (source)

Alpha Lo:

“Occupy is a complex system. Little tweaks can make a complex system emerge very different behaviors. Two little tweaks helped shift the Occupy movement from being a relatively (on the global scale) little blip protest to being a world-wide movement. There were a number of other movements in 2011: The Other 98%, US Uncut, and Reclaim the Dream. None of them really took off because they missed these little tweaks. … One was the little tweak of moving this from being a demand-based protest to having “a general assembly decide what we should do” based movement catapulted Occupy. It shifted the operating system of Occupy so that it could become more inclusive of different demographics and worldviews. The other little tweak was the idea of camping out permanently in a public place. This tweak allowed the movement to reclaim the commons, giving a physical place for many to organically come together to self-organize and emerge something powerful. The ongoing nature of the space allowed the system to iterate, to build on what it had the previous day, so that a village began to emerge on these commons.” (source)

David Graeber:

“How, then, did OWS embody anarchist principles? It might be helpful to go over this point by point: …

“3) The refusal to create an internal hierarchy, but instead to create a form of consensus-based direct democracy.

“From the very beginning, too, organisers made the audacious decision to operate not only by direct democracy, without leaders, but by consensus. The first decision ensured that there would be no formal leadership structure that could be co-opted or coerced; the second, that no majority could bend a minority to its will, but that all crucial decisions had to be made by general consent. American anarchists have long considered consensus process (a tradition that has emerged from a confluence of feminism, anarchism and spiritual traditions like the Quakers) crucial for the reason that it is the only form of decision-making that could operate without coercive enforcement - since if a majority does not have the means to compel a minority to obey its dictates, all decisions will, of necessity, have to be made by general consent.

“4) The embrace of prefigurative politics.

“As a result, Zuccotti Park, and all subsequent encampments, became spaces of experiment with creating the institutions of a new society - not only democratic General Assemblies but kitchens, libraries, clinics, media centres and a host of other institutions, all operating on anarchist principles of mutual aid and self-organisation - a genuine attempt to create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old.” (source)

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri:

“The challenges on the political terrain are equally thorny. Some of the most inspiring and innovative events and revolts in the last decade have radicalized democratic thinking and practice by occupying and organizing a space, such as a public square, with open, participatory structures or assemblies, maintaining these new democratic forms for weeks or months. Indeed the internal organization of the movements themselves has been constantly subjected to processes of democratization, striving to create horizontal participatory network structures. The revolts against the dominant political system, its professional politicians, and its illegitimate structures of representation are thus not aimed at restoring some imagined legitimate representational system of the past but rather at experimenting with new democratic forms of expression: democracia real ya.” (source)

Sam Halvorsen:

“The above scenario brought us into very familiar territory for those in the occupy movement: “meetings about meetings” or, if you are really unlucky, “meetings about meetings about meetings”. The failure of democracy, both political and economic, that has been so widely experienced by those occupying has lead to a very strong emphasis on non-hierarchical and participatory politics in the movement. The act of occupation has been a crucial tactic to open up space for democratic experimentation. By collectively occupying a space there are no guests; we are all hosts. This means we must take responsibility for our space, and find a way of organising ourselves that is acceptable to all. …

“… It is not the destination that drives us, but the path that takes us there. And it is a path that we make by walking on it, constantly (re)making it in the process.” (source)

Mike Davis:

“Second, continue to democratize and productively occupy public space (i.e. reclaim the Commons).” (source)

George Pór:

“Taking back the commons is exactly what occupying stands for. It goes far deeper than corporate personhood or the corruption of politics by money.

“The country belongs to its people. The world belongs to its people. But the ultimate agenda of the forces we are opposing is to privatize everything — and then rent it out to us at extortionate rates.

“The means that occupying is not just about holding space as a form of civil disobedience. It’s about reclaiming the commons, one inch at a time if necessary.

“And it’s about reclaiming cultural space as well — which is why SOPA and “intellectual property” issues are so important. The corporate forces have been privatizing our myths and our dreams as well, and we have to either take those back or create new myths and new dreams that they cannot touch.” (source)

Tim Gee:

“Then of course there is Egypt, whose 2011 Tahrir Square camp to some extent inspired the current ‘Occupy’ movement. In an interview for New Internationalist earlier this year, activist Gigi Ibrahim called it ‘a mini-example of what direct democracy looks like. People took charge of everything – trash, food, security. It was a self-sustaining entity. And in the middle of this, under every tent, on every corner, people were having debates about their demands, the future, how things should go economically and politically. It was fascinating. It was a mirror of what Egypt would look like if it was democratic.’ It is likely that anyone who has participated in the recent wave of ‘Occupy’ camps would be able to recognise this sentiment.

“So it can be seen that protest camping can play a role in bringing about social change. Camps can be spaces for people to debate and learn from one another on a large scale, outside of the structures of authority and hegemony that shape ordinary life. But while the awakening of critical consciousness is central to effective struggle it is not enough. Only by using camps as bases from which direct actions are taken which undermine the interests of the ‘haves’, are such camps successful in their aims.” (source)

Isham Christie:

“… Electoral liberalism will persist, but a new and increasingly dominant form of political participation is emerging — localized participatory democracy, horizontalism, and the encampment-form. These are not only alternatives in terms of social structure, but interesting enough they are the means by which social structures can be transformed. We are seeing the fusion of means and ends to a large extent in the encampment movements.

“The activity of taking over public space, holding general assemblies, setting up camp and building infrastructure for the needs of the camp is becoming the new and prevalent form of organized opposition. The previously dominant forms of political opposition — the party-form, the membership–form, the union-form, cadre-form, voting-form, etc. — still play a role in the encampment movement. But it’s this novel form of political and social organization, the encampment, that has come to blossom. …

“… What the Occupy movement allows for is the opening up of social space in which a variety of different and hitherto largely isolated social struggles can converge.” (source)

Alexis Madrigal:

“GET Occupation: Occupying physical space stands in for a greater metaphorical occupation of the commons. Actions to permanently occupy or reoccupy a park focus and energize a larger group of temporary protesters and armchair supporters at home. The physical location provides an anchor for virtual activities.

“GET Decentralized leadership structure: Repeat mantra that the movement is 'leaderless.' In practice, have no single leader on whom the media and/or public can focus. Avoid profiles of organizers. If necessary, elect a dog as leader of the occupation, a la Denver.

“GET Loudly inclusive userbase: Do not require any particular identification, such as labor or ethnic identity. While youth-driven, make sure to highlight examples of older occupiers.” (source)

Michael Kimmelman:

“The ever expanding Occupy Wall Street movement, with encampments now not only in Lower Manhattan but also in Washington, London and other cities, proves among other things that no matter how instrumental new media have become in spreading protest these days, nothing replaces people taking to the streets.

“… Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.

“… The whole situation illustrates just how far we have allowed the ancient civic ideal of public space to drift from an arena of public expression and public assembly (Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, say) to a commercial sop (the foyer of the Time Warner Center).” (source)

— On social netwar, swarming, and police responses —

Tim Rayner:

“Simplifying a little, we can say that traditional movements shape and transform their member’s identities in the following way: first, by orienting thought in relation to a (mostly negative and critical) ‘cognitive map’ of how things work (referring to the capitalist system, patriarchy, the military-industrial complex, colonialism, or the coldest of cold monsters, the state); second, corralling identity in terms of a unitary social class or group (workers, women, ‘the youth’, gays, the oppressed, etc); and finally, by activating the movement by steering its energies towards contesting established political and legal structures. …

“Swarm movements shape identity in a completely different way. First off, they are are issue- or cause-based, rather than identity-based, movements. Instead of seeking to reduce the movement to a single set of grievances representing the struggles of a single group identity, swarm movements affirm the diversity of participants as their fundamental strength. This diversity is irreducible to a single identity, but it is powerful when focused on a common cause. …

“Swarms are transformative movements. Insofar as members acknowledge a common sense of identity, it is a transformative identity, a sense of being part of a movement that is changing the world. …

“We can map the logic of the identity shift involved in swarm movements as follows. First, a mass of people acquire a new cognitive map, representing an original conception of what they can achieve together as a network. The cognitive maps that inspire OccupyWallStreet and Occupy Together resonate with innovations in the online world. OccupyWallStreet is an ‘open space’ movement. The camp structure is an open API that anyone is free to hack into and explore using MeetUp as a Directory. The second step in the process comes when the mass of people who apply these cognitive maps start reflecting on how working together expands their common potential. This insight gives rise to the swarm. A swarm movement comes into being as a swarm when a mass collective grasps what it is capable of achieving en masse.

“Swarms transform our shared sense of the possible. This is what draws people to these movements. It is the key to their unique political power.” (source)

Luis Moreno-Caballud and Marina Sitrin:

“The capacity to create solutions grows as the movements expand in all directions, first through the appearance of multiple occupations connected among themselves, and then through the creation of—or collaboration with—groups or networks that are able to solve problems on a local level through cooperation and the sharing of skills and resources. …

“In the case of Spain, this expansion began in June, when the movement decided to focus its energy more on the assemblies and the working groups than on maintaining the encampments themselves. To maintain the miniature models of a society that the movement wished to create did not necessarily contribute to the actual changes that were needed in the populations that needed them the most. Which is why the decision to move away from the encampments was nothing more than another impulse in the constructive aims of the movement: the real encampment that has to be reconstructed is the world. …

“All the while continuing to occupy space and territory, but seeing the territory as what happens together, with one another, in multiple places, and then coming together to share in another geographic place. This could take place on the level of neighborhood to neighborhood – to the level of city to city, all networked in horizontal assemblies.” (source)

Gaston Gordillo:

“The images of the UC Davis police officer calmly pepper-spraying human bodies as if they were insects went viral because the most defining feature of the human chain is that it is defensive in nature … . By interlocking and immobilizing the main parts of the human body that can be used to cause physical harm, arms and hands, this is an assemblage that because of its form cannot be a source of violence. And human chains that sit on the ground make this defensiveness even more apparent, for even the legs of protesters are purposely immobilized. …

“… The police officer, following orders, attacked the chain because of its power to prevent the state from having full control of the local terrain. …

“The dismantling by the police of the node of resonance in Liberty Park in New York only seems to have accelerated the spread of the rebellion and its adoption of even more rhizomic, mobile, unstable, unpredictable lines of spatial expansion. This expansion is leading to the creation of myriad human chains to protect encampments, to prevent families whose homes are foreclosed by banks from being evicted by the police, and to shut down banks, corporate offices, and university buildings. The occupation of everywhere is no longer just a slogan but an actual physical struggle for the control of myriad nodes of the national and global space. And one of the main weapons the insurrection relies on to challenge the police in public space has been the human chains that striate the smoothness of state space.” (source)

Lester Macgurdy:

“In summary: when the cops come to clear the park, don’t resist. As they are preparing for their military maneuver and use of force that the Occupiers cannot reasonably be expected to resist, the occupiers should be packing up their tents and baggage and loading them into wagons, bicycles, backpacks, etc.

“Force the cops to clear the park inch by inch, but try to avoid arrest in so doing. Once they have cleared the park, rouse the crowd through loud amplification announcing that you intend to march (any destination will do). Get the music blaring and then march aimlessly, blocking traffic the whole way, for hours. The crowd will be energized and willing to march for a long time, being spurred on by energetic music and chants.

“The police will eventually trim down their entourage because they realize that they are helpless. Eventually, work your way back to the park. Or, if the police have fenced off the park, head to another park. If the police force you out, march again and they will be forced to follow. Eventually, they will inevitably come to the conclusion that they would rather have you in a park than disrupting traffic.

“The police have no response to this tactic, other than resorting to brutality. And if they do that, we win whether they clear the park or not.” (source)

David Harvey:

“In response to the Occupy Wall Street movement the state backed by capitalist class power makes an astonishing claim: that they and only they have the exclusive right to regulate and dispose of public space. The public has no common right to public space! By what right do mayors, police chiefs, military officers and state officials tell we, the people, that they have the right to determine what is public about “our” public space, and who may occupy that space, and when? When did they presume to evict us, the people, from any space we, the people, decide collectively and peacefully to occupy? They claim they are taking action in the public interest (and cite laws to prove it), but it is we who are the public! Where is “our interest” in all of this? And, by the way, is it not “our” money that the banks and financiers so blatantly use to accumulate “their” bonuses?” (source)

David Bollier:

“… how the police (acting on behalf of business) seeks to limit and privatize public spaces in order to stifle protest against enclosures. In other words, repression of protest is an act of enclosure itself — and literally occurs when the state requires a “permit to protest” and the police push people off the commons of public spaces into “private” spaces so that they can arrest (and de-legitimize) them.” (source)

Glenn Greenwald:

“In sum, there is a sprawling apparatus of federal and local militarized police forces and private corporate security designed to send this message: if you participate in protests or other forms of dissent outside of harmless approved channels, you’re going to be harmed in numerous ways.” (source: italics in original) (follow-up)

Tom Englehardt:

“All of this is the spawn of the 9/11 moment, which is why, on November 15th when the NYPD entered the encampment at Zuccotti Park, a weaponless and peaceable spot filled with sleeping activists and the homeless, they used pepper spray, ripped and tore down everything, and tossed all 4,000 books from the OWS “library” into a dumpster, damaging or mangling most of them. Books couldn’t escape the state’s violence, nor could the library’s tent, bookshelves, chairs, computers, periodicals, and archives. Even librarians were arrested. …

“Stop for a moment and imagine what the headlines here would have been like if Iranian or Chinese police had broken into a peaceful oppositional encampment and literally trashed its library without a second thought. The barbarians! Imagine what a field day the pundits would have had. Imagine what Fox News would have said.” (from headnote at source)

Jeremy Kessler:

“Occupy Wall Street’s unorthodox approach to direct action was on full display Thursday morning as multiple columns of marchers encircled Wall Street. The flood of protesters stopped to chant or quickly moved on, depending on the density of police personnel arrayed to corral and disperse the crowd. Others sat down in front of barricades when the police refused further access to the public. This seemingly chaotic rhythm of the protest was, in fact, intentional. …

“… Although these general contours of the action were planned en masse, over a dozen affinity groups—self-organizing sets of volunteers—met on their own to plan actions-within-the action: some would break off from the main march to proceed directly to Wall Street through a Duane Reade on Pine; others planned acts of civil disobedience at strategic locations.

“This organized randomness frustrated police tactics, which are best suited to corralling a single-minded mass. …

“There is no doubt something forceful about protesters seeking to hold ground against riot police who deny their right to public sidewalks. There is no doubt something forceful about men and women who sit down in front of a police barricade and lock arms, as police officers shout at them. But these tactics of holding space are a clear, nonviolent rebuke to the array of police weaponry that rains down on demonstrators on a daily basis.” (source)

Joan Donovan:

In the coming weeks, Occupiers will be challenged to realign with everyday life in order to regain balance in the “real world” without the refuge of the camp, which had become a monumental and uniting force. The campsite had its own gravity, temporality, and rumor-driven reality. What makes this movement strong, though, is its ability to adapt, be mobile, and create alternatives during times of distress. These are anomic times that require a nomadic response.

“Like Occupy Wall Street, the General Assembly of Occupy LA is currently working on an outreach strategy that will spread the movement across the city, with General Assemblies popping up like tents in public spaces. Now that the method of horizontal participatory democracy has been learned by thousands of people who came through the camp at City Hall, Occupy LA will facilitate an initial round of neighborhood assemblies and continue the work of reanimating a local civic spirit. This tactic avoids the peril of trying to defend the space of City Hall that is already fully militarized, and thus, already occupied in a different sense.” (source)

Jules Lobel:

“A different tactical response is to create what essentially would be a non-violent guerrilla movement in American cities. For example, Kalle Lasn, the Adbuster magazine publisher and originator of the Wall Street encampment idea, reportedly urged a new "swarming strategy of surprise attacks against business as usual." The Chicago occupiers have resolved to have an event a day throughout the winter, such as defending foreclosed homes, sit-ins, banner drops, building parks, providing supplies to the homeless, or guerrilla theater and art. In the same vein, longtime social movement scholar and activist Francis Fox Piven foresaw some time ago that the movement would develop new phases, utilizing "other forms of disruptive protests that are punchier than occupying a square," or "rolling occupations of public space."

“This article suggests another alternative, one that focuses on creating sustainable alternative decentralized institutions that reflect in microcosm the egalitarian, democratic vision of society that the Occupy Movement has put forth. Such a strategy would be combined with a continual presence in the streets and parks around issues of injustice such as foreclosures.” (source)

— On symbolic narratives and noöpolitik —

Terra Lawson-Remer:

OWS has shifted the frame of the national political conversation, making possible policy positions that would have felt precariously progressive to establishment power brokers just two months ago. But sustaining this momentum will require that OWS broaden and deepen internally, and catalyze support for allies with the institutional capacity to leverage strategic and sustained pressure in pursuit of more specific agendas. …

Broaden, by creating the space and possibility for people to actively participate in the movement without attending three hour long General Assemblies, or sleeping outside in the rain and snow. …

The movement will also need to deepen, by strengthening internal cohesion, building skills, and developing a more coherent analysis among members and participants.” (source)

Marieke de Goede:

“It is perhaps not the absence of the defined agenda and clear list of demands that is the most striking feature of Occupy. Its striking feature is its impossible promise to anchor and call to account speculative practice. Its stasis and occupation contradict the mobility and fluidity of contemporary speculation. Its ambition to stay, to extend its presence, to remain immobile, interrupts the constant drive to commodification and circulation of investment capital. With the same people in charge of ‘solving’ the crisis as have participated in bringing it about, and while the international bond markets hold European politics hostage, Occupy has hit the right target – even if the derivative is impossible to locate and the culprit banker does not necessary reside behind the occupied doorsteps.” (source)

John Reilly:

“Regarding the motives of the Occupiers, it is often remarked that they have trouble articulating why they are trying to preempt public space. There is indeed a catechism of slogans that activists deliver to the press, usually touching on income inequality, but these slogans are not doctrine or even common knowledge among the participants. The know-nothing state of the Occupation is often presented as a defect. That misses the point.

“… Similarly, the reasons or unreasons that people offer who have excluded civil authority from public space are less important than the fact they have excluded civil authority from public space. Note that the occupations are generally near centers of government. This fact-on-the-ground is not in service to theory; it is what theory has always tried to achieve.” (source)

Slavoj Zizek:

“The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?

“Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning.

“The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots [in London], therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are inadequate. …

“… And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests [in Spain]: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

“… When the protesters [in Greece] started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.” (source)

David Harvey:

“But now, for the first time, there is an explicit movement to confront The Party of Wall Street and its unalloyed money power. The “street” in Wall Street is being occupied—oh horror upon horrors—by others! Spreading from city to city, the tactics of Occupy Wall Street are to take a central public space, a park or a square, close to where many of the levers of power are centered, and by putting human bodies there convert public space into a political commons, a place for open discussion and debate over what that power is doing and how best to oppose its reach. This tactic, most conspicuously re-animated in the noble and on-going struggles centered on Tahrir Square in Cairo, has spread across the world (Plaza del Sol in Madrid, Syntagma Square in Athens, now the steps of Saint Paul’s in London as well as Wall Street itself). It shows us that the collective power of bodies in public space is still the most effective instrument of opposition when all other means of access are blocked. What Tahrir Square showed to the world was an obvious truth: that it is bodies on the street and in the squares not the babble of sentiments on Twitter or Facebook that really matter. …

“In response to the Occupy Wall Street movement the state backed by capitalist class power makes an astonishing claim: that they and only they have the exclusive right to regulate and dispose of public space. The public has no common right to public space! By what right do mayors, police chiefs, military officers and state officials tell we, the people, that they have the right to determine what is public about “our” public space, and who may occupy that space, and when? When did they presume to evict us, the people, from any space we, the people, decide collectively and peacefully to occupy? They claim they are taking action in the public interest (and cite laws to prove it), but it is we who are the public! Where is “our interest” in all of this? And, by the way, is it not “our” money that the banks and financiers so blatantly use to accumulate “their” bonuses?” (source)

Michael Lerner:

“And, like the Sixties, there were also problems:

“* In the name of “inclusion” and “non-judgmentalism,” the vast majority of nonviolence-oriented people felt unable to stop a comparatively tiny group of masked protesters from breaking windows and introducing a feel of violence that gave the corporate media their pretext for making “violence” the center of the story they reported to the world.

“* Due to the movement’s aversion to leadership (epitomized by the slogan, “we are all leaders and have no leaders”) it has become impossible to develop a coherent vision of what we are for. …

“*A fetishization of the occupied spaces, as though these physical sites were the center of the struggle, rather than the broader pursuit of justice for the 99 percent. Inordinate focus on the occupied spaces themselves, and the newly asserted “right” to have tents and cooking facilities through the nights, puts the movement at risk of losing sight of the larger goal: rejecting the ethos of materialism and selfishness of global capitalism and replacing it with an ethos of love, kindness, generosity and environmental responsibility (in short, building “the Caring Society—caring for each other, caring for the earth”).” (source)

Peter Marcuse:

“What role does space, and the physical occupation of a specific space, then play in each of these aspects? …

“The particular space being occupied should not be fetishized, should not become the prize, the conquest of which is the goal of the movement. It is only, for most aspects of the movement, symbolic; the rise and fall of the movement should not be linked to the extent of the physical occupation of a given space. The spaces sought for occupancy are not the prize for which the battle is being fought, but rather a terrain on which that battle takes place, and a more or less important source of support to facilitate the achievement of objectives more important than the command of a particular piece of ground.” (source)

Gavin Aronsen:

“There seemed to be little consensus on the meaning of "diversity of tactics" and what qualifies as "violence." But the questions raised represent a crucial debate for this prominent satellite of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which continued to draw attention after late-night rioting tainted a major general strike demonstration that shut down the nation’s fifth-largest port on November 2. There has been broad agreement among police and protesters alike that anarchists employing black bloc tactics—a concept that originated in Europe four decades ago in which protesters conceal their faces, dress in black, and often carry out targeted property destruction—were responsible for the rioting. But so far Occupy Oakland has failed to agree on what to do about the black bloc proponents in its midst. …

“Ultimately, while many Oakland occupiers might empathize with the frustrations driving black bloc fans to bold statements and shows of force, the fear of alienating mainstream sympathy for the movement looms large. As Oakland union organizer Jeff Duritz put it: "It’s nearly impossible to change the country. The only way that that could possibly happen is if that’s a mass movement. If my mom can’t come, we’re not going to change the country. That’s the bottom line. We could spend days debating what 'violence' means, but when we boil it down, when someone smashes a window that means no one’s mom is coming, and we need the moms to come."” (source)

Aaron Bady:

“This distinction is especially important, because a certain idealized (and whitewashed) version of #OWS has become a useful narrative for a variety of establishment politicians and critics of both good and false faith. But we need to beware of people who pay theoretical lip service to an idealized “Occupy Wall Street” brand and then to use the particular shortcomings of its local iteration to condemn it. Oakland mayor Jean Quan, for example, always says that she supports the goals and principles of Occupy Wall Street—a theoretical solidarity, by which she is rhetorically positions herself in opposition to abstractions like “Wall Street”—but this theoretical solidarity has, of course, never translated into any actual support for Occupy Oakland. And this is precisely its purpose: a symbolic protest against a symbolic abstraction like “the banks” is sufficiently meaningless in practice that almost anyone can rhetorically sign on. And once a symbolic protest has been allowed, for the moment, the nonsymbolic protest (of breaking a law against open flames or camping in public) suddenly becomes all the more illegal by reference to it. …

“The construction of a thing called “The Oakland Commune” at a plaza that was re-named after Oscar Grant was, in this sense, not a franchise of Occupy Wall Street but a revolutionary defense of that particular space, the demand that we who occupy it have the right to decide what will be made of it. …

“All of this is necessary background for understanding why, from the beginning, Occupy Oakland has been the kind of radically inclusive space that it’s been, why the beating revolutionary heart of the camp has not been its library or information tent—or even the General Assembly—but the kitchen that fed thousands of hungry Oaklanders every day, or the grassy space of Frank Ogawa Plaza where Downtown Oakland’s substantial homeless population could find a home. Local history is necessary for understanding why the occupants of the “Oakland Commune” have focused less on national economic issues than on the right to the city of Oakland which has, for so long, been denied them. Occupy Oakland has set its sights resolutely local from the very beginning; while anti-bank rhetoric and actions have not been absent, of course, activists at Occupy Oakland have targeted the five elementary schools that Alameda County recently voted to close, for example, and are moving in recent weeks towards defending neighborhood homes from foreclosure.” (source)

Matt Stoller:

“What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. It’s not a march, though marches are spinning off of the campground. It’s not even a protest, really. It is a group of people, gathered together, to create a public space seeking meaning in their culture. They are asserting, together, to each other and to themselves, “we matter”. …

“… Furthermore, the space is fraught with the problem of consensus-based anti-leadership organizing. There are no spokespeople, and you can’t get on their media list (they don’t have one). The anti-leadership non-hierarchical consensus method is designed to avoid the way that leaders can be smeared and/or co-opted. It does not really scale, and this is a serious challenge going forward. But ultimately, the energy of just having a bunch of people in one place for a long period of time is very different, and much more interesting, than just a march. The protesters are creating a public space for the discussion of economic justice, just by showing up. …

“… But perhaps success and failure isn’t the right way to think about what’s going on in downtown New York, any more than thinking about a church as successful or failed based on its political objectives is the right way to think about how those in the pews satisfy their thirst for spiritual vigor. What these people have found in themselves, and created for each other, is meaning.” (source)

Ben Brazil:

“On at least two levels, then, the “church of dissent” faces the need for compromise: with the workings of power, and with the need to maintain the “big tent” required to legitimately claim it. But, as Troeltsch knew, compromise sits uneasily with true believers and – I would add – with idealists. Historically, it tends to generate the sects, smaller groups that recoil against the defilement of compromise and form narrower communities of the committed, pure, and pious. They do not make claims on state power, seeking only tolerance for their own islands of purity. They favor principle over pragmatism, and purity over change. It’s not a perfect analogy, but my experiences at Occupy Atlanta suggest a group caught between an impulse to be a sect of the politically pure and the need to become a bigger church of dissent. And I believe the issue, at this point, has less to do with substance than with tone, style, and aesthetics.” (source)

Adrian Pabst:

“In short, capitalism profanes the sacred and sacralizes the profane—a modern radicalization of the moneylenders who desecrated the temple. In part, this explains why the glocal protest movement is concerned not just with purely material or technical issues but also (and perhaps more so than previous protests) with symbolic resonance. …

“Thus, the global protest movement and its manifold local expressions seem to provide a post-secular response to the secular heresy of global capitalism and its political sponsors. The contested space of the city—both local and global—appears to contain the germs of a vision for an alternative economy that reconnects the financial to the ethical and an alternative politics that reasserts the primacy of the civic over the economic and the social.

“If this is the case, then it seems that the global protest movement has the potential to offer a new kind of ideology that transcends the old binary relations that have characterized modern politics. By linking universal principles to particular, transformative practices, the global protest movement and the myriad of local civic initiatives might even politicize the wider population and help foster new virtuous elites.” (source)

Donna Schaper:

“If the spirit of Occupy Wall Street and its home at “Liberty Square” is to survive and have impact, occupiers need a larger understanding of what sacred space is and what it isn’t. Sacred space can be anywhere, any time. It is by definition beyond time and place. … Sacred space is eternal storied flow, not eternally fixed. Sacred space is storied place. …

“One of the saddest casualties of the way the police emptied the park was the way they dispersed the community. They made people go north in Manhattan up one street, then another. They were forced into groups of forty at a time. The movement was dispersed into a diaspora, forcing choices about what space to consider home but more importantly about how to find each other. Cell phone charging has been a form of returning sacred space to the movement so that people could find each other to negotiate next steps. … Turning the fight into a fight with police or the city over space will rigidify the movement and cause sacred space to be a sterile demand, compared to the original demands of economic justice on behalf of the 99%. Such a fight will mistake sacred space as one time or place. You can occupy everywhere, as long as your original purpose is something larger than one place. You can also get stuck anywhere, if your purpose is to stay in one place as though it was yours.” (source)

Micah L. Sifry:

“I asked Andrew Boyd, one of the co-founders of "The Other 98%," why Occupy Wall Street was succeeding compared to these other efforts. I should note that Andrew is an old friend of mine who has been doing online and street organizing for many years (he was one of the co-founders of Billionaires for Bush or Gore back in 2000/04), and he and his colleagues are now very involved in helping the Occupy Wall Street movement. He offered three reasons:

1. There's a little bit of randomness to what works. You have to just keep throwing things against the wall until something sticks. That said, there were clearly nerves to strike.

2. The tactic of occupation: The permanence of it. We're not going to leave, we're going to stick it out. The personal commitment and determination of people on the ground to see that through. That creates a human story and drama and a demonstration of personal commitment that matters, regardless of whether people think they're "dirty hippies." And it creates a dramatic narrative, too. Will the cops kick them out? Will they outlast the weather?

3. The lack of demands: Functionally it's genius, even if it wasn't strategically intentional. This makes OWS an open space a that everyone can bring their resentments, anger, longings, and dreams, to. It also puts OWS in the "right vs wrong box," instead of in the "political calculation" box. It doesn't feel calculated. …

“Boyd offers a fourth reason for Occupy Wall Street's rapid spread: it isn't afraid to talk about revolution, a subject that may be on more minds that people realize.” (source)

Naomi Klein:

“Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful. …

“We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets – like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.

“Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

“Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.” (source)

John Robb:

“Occupy is an open source protest. That means it doesn't have a specific message. It is a container for many groups/motivations/passions held together by simplest of ideas: it is possible to permanently occupy places of power. Anyone that tells you it needs to have a specific policy agenda is a) not an expert and b) still living in the 20th Century.

“The Occupy approach, a permanent 24x7x365 geographically ubiquitous protest movement, may be about to zoom. Reinforcements are coming.

“From where? Europe. However, this reinforcement isn't in the form of bodies on the street or money. It's VALIDATION … ” (source; edited to correct presumed typos)

Mosireen:

“We ask you to take action:

“■Occupy / shut-down Egyptian embassies worldwide. Now they represent the junta; reclaim them for the Egyptian people.
“■Shut down the arms dealers. Do not let them make it, ship it.
“■Shut down the part of your government dealing with the Egyptian junta. 

The revolution continues, because we have no other choice. “From Tahrir Square / 22 November / 14:00” (source)

Stuart Elden:

“The occupation [in London] is of space, but this is a space which is both actual and figurative. One of the great ironies of the financial crisis is that the dominant response has been more, not less, neoliberal policies. It is being recoded as a crisis within neoliberalism, instead of being seen as the crisis of neoliberalism.

“Occupy seems to be saying that we cannot simply seek changes within the system, but we may need to discover an alternative. It is for that reason that simple demands which could be met or refused are inappropriate. For another world to be possible we first need to conceive the world differently.” (source)

Mike Davis:

“Eighth, the future of the Occupy movement will be determined less by the numbers in Liberty Park (although its survival is a sine qua non of the future) than by the boots on the ground in Dayton, Cheyenne, Omaha, and El Paso. The geographical spread of the protests in many cases equals a diversifying involvement of people of color and trade unionists.

“The advent of social media, of course, has created unprecedented opportunities for horizontal dialogue among non-elite activists all over the country and the world. But the Occupy Main Streets still need more support from the better resourced and mediagenic groups in the major urban and academic centers. A self-financed national speakers and performers bureau would be invaluable.” (source)

— Readings that speak to time and action orientations —

Rebecca Solnit:

“The history of revolution is the history of great public spaces: the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution; the Ramblas in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War; Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 (a splendid rebellion that was crushed); the great surge that turned the divide of the Berlin Wall into a gathering place in that same year; the insurrectionary occupation of the Zocalo of Mexico City after corrupt presidential elections and of the space in Buenos Aires that gave the Dirty War’s most open opposition its name: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of the Plaza of May.

“It’s all very well to organize on Facebook and update on Twitter, but these are only preludes. You also need to rise up, to pour out into the streets. You need to be together in body, for only then are you truly the public with the full power that a public can possess. And then it needs to matter. The United States is good at trivializing and ignoring insurrections at home. …

“So remember to expect the unexpected, but not just to wait for it. Sometimes you have to become the unexpected, as the young heroes and heroines of 2011 have. I am sure they themselves are as surprised as anyone. Since she very nearly had the first word, let Asmaa Mahfouz have the last word: "As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope."″ (source)

Nathan Jurgenson:

“The prevalence of smartphones, social media, videostreams and the like may be the dominant technological narrative told about Occupy Wall Street, but to focus only on high-tech is to tell a very incomplete story. The reality is that Occupy has also embraced non-electronic low-tech; not just out of necessity but politically and symbolically …

“More conceptually, space and time are important technologies because the name "occupy" specifically refers to occupying physical space for an extended period of time. A march takes up space, but an omnipresent occupation with tents also takes up time. With the recent wave of police effort clearing occupations of their infrastructure, this balance of space and time becomes increasingly important and something I hope to expand on in a later post. …

“Questions about whether the Web promotes revolution or repression often miss the point: high/low-tech and on/offline all augment each other, utilized side-by-side rather than through displacement.” (source)

Kristin Lawler:

“In further radical conjoining, the old economic-lefty memes—general strike, revolution, solidarity, resistance—agitate side by side with signifiers of the very postmodern critique of representation embodied by Occupy, like the Guy Fawkes “V for Vendetta” masks, the seminal figure of Anonymous, the radical, nonhierarchical democracy of the people’s mic, the rejection of “rational,” “representative” organization, and the refusal to issue a list of demands, to present a unified “identity.” Former antagonists—the old left and the new left, hippies and hardhats, Marxism and postmodernism—are all happily occupying the same urban and discursive spaces. And everybody seems really, really stoked about it.

“At root, it’s all always been the same struggle anyway. The refusal of work, of the incessant instrumentalization of time and space, is the essence of both counterculture and working-class struggle.” (source)

Rinku Sen:

“ … So, organizations do campaigns, and movements do something else. They shift the public will. And so, the Occupy movement has to retain its ability to do its primary job, as I understand it, which is to keep shifting the public will and making that psychic break happen and supporting that psychic break.” (source)

Ying Quian:

“Philippe Lejeune, a French artist living in Boston, told me at Occupy Boston, “Maybe I am old, but what I care about is memory. What kind of memory will Occupy leave us? In 1968, I was eighteen and living in Paris. The memory of 1968 has changed my life. How will the memory of Occupy change the young people today?” I believe Occupy will leave a lot more than memories: it will continue as a long-term movement, persisting in the present rather than slipping into the past.” (source)

Jason Adams:

“For many of those involved, maintaining this spatial focus became the sine qua non of the movement, even in the face, for instance, of the changing of the seasons and ongoing police evictions. In nearly every history-altering moment of the past however, from the Paris Commune to the antiglobalization movement, it was the element of time that proved most decisive. There is a reason, for instance, that the clock towers were the first target chosen by the French communards. Occupy is no exception: as the Jesuit thinker Baltasar Gracián held, beyond all other considerations, it is time rather than space that best positions one to win. …

“Rather than maintaining this spatial strategy at all costs, what is most interesting about Occupy now is that it is increasingly complicating static images of space: it is, in short, occupying time. This has meant a shift to a more fluid, tactical approach, one not only appropriate to the specifics of constantly changing situations deployed from above, but one that more importantly, allows it to bring forth new ones, from below. Indeed, the initial introduction of an open duration for the Occupy events already oriented the subsequent events primarily towards the temporal and the tactical rather than the spatial and strategic. This was truly its greatest strength and is the major reason the spatial strategy did as well as it did. …

“Perhaps then, if transforming the collective situation remains the primary concern, some consideration of the space/time as well as strategy/tactics relationships is in order. …

“… Every situation is different and occupying time rather than space does not mean anything goes. Rather it means that because it is the only possible basis for increased resonance, multiplicity should be valued more than unity, just as dissensus should be valued more than consensus.” (source)

Ananya Roy:

“That the Occupy movement has found material expression in the occupation of space is obvious. That various forms of government seeking to dislodge Occupy protesters from city parks or university yards have had to enact spatial evictions, at times through police batons and teargas, is also obvious.

“But let me argue for a moment that what is fundamentally at stake in the Occupy movement is a claim to the future, and that the temporal imaginations of the movement are perhaps more instructive than its spatialities. There is of course an endearing spatial intimacy to a movement that seeks to challenge the predations of globally circulating finance capital. But the Occupy movement also interrupts the temporality of financialized futures. Note for example the unfolding of time that is the daily general assembly, a ritual of democracy so deliberately/ deliberatively slow that it becomes a type of unthinkable space.” (source)

Jester:

“Occupy is implicitly a movement in which spatiality figures centrally. Appropriately, then, the journal Society and Space has opened an interesting forum on the movement, with many stellar contributions. But Ananya Roy makes the argument that the movement’s temporal dimensions—particularly its staking a claim on the future—is perhaps more instructive than its spatiality. With a hat-tip to yours truly, Stuart Elden explores the politics of the Guy Fawkes mask rebranding it “V for Visibility.” Eduardo Mendieta, meanwhile, reveals the praxis embedded in “occupy” itself as a word, a concept, and an action. Check out the many other provocative contributions and a few links to other related writings.” (source)

Thomas Friedman:

“In 2001, a book came out about George Mitchell’s diplomatic work in Northern Ireland that was entitled “To Hell With the Future, Let’s Get On With the Past.” One hopes that such a book will never be written about today’s Arab awakenings. But watching events unfold out there makes it impossible not to ask: Will the past bury the future in the Arab world or will the future bury the past? ...

“This is the grand drama now being played out in the Arab world — the deeply sincere youth-led quest for liberty and the deeply rooted quests for sectarian, factional, class and tribal advantage. One day it looks as though the revolutions in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia are going to be hijacked by forces and passions from the past while the next day that longing of young people to be free and modern pushes them back.” (source)

Michael Moore:

“… You—you have been occupied by Wall Street. Your homes have been occupied by Wall Street. Your government has been occupied by Wall Street. Your media has been occupied by Wall Street. And it’s OK for you to say, "Not anymore. Those days are over. End of story."” (source)

Reverend Nemu:

“The time is ripe for a new form of governance, and the tools are in our hands. Innovative networks span the globe, using new media technologies of Twitter and Livestream to disseminate information and coordinate the very first international occupation. King James shut down parliament, and Mayor Bloomberg shut down the Wall Street occupation, but the End is Nigh today, as it was back in the day.

“The question is not whether we can bring down this hideous harlot riding the beast of post-capitalist imperialism; she is quite capable of doing that itself. The issue is whether we can look beyond our crumbling institutions and imagine something better.” (source)

5 Days in August: An Interim Report on the 2011 English Riots:

“The fact that many people abused society’s moral and legal codes when the opportunity arose paints a disturbing picture. Most disturbing to us was a widespread feeling that some rioters had no hope and nothing to lose.

“‘Some people get to 14 or 15 years old without ever being told they’re good at anything. They feel a sense of worthlessness.’

“Having a stake in society is important. We spoke to many individuals from similar backgrounds who didn’t riot. They told us that they had a place in society that they did not want to jeopardise. They showed an awareness of shared values. They had the resilience to take the knocks and create opportunities for themselves. The fact that these people, who had similar disadvantages in life to many of those who chose to riot, felt able to look positively to the future greatly impressed us.” (source)

Tim Newburn, Paul Lewis and Josephine Metcalf:

“Although rioters interviewed by the Guardian/LSE often said their mistreatment, particularly at the hands of police, was a consequence of race, they were mostly adamant the disturbances were not race riots. If anything, many saw the disorder as a coming together of ethnically disparate groups who loosely shared a sense of injustice. …

“… Many of those interviewed by the Guardian/LSE spoke about the status attributed to brand items, admitting they saw August's perceived lawlessness as a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to acquire consumer goods they could not ordinarily afford. As one 15-year-girl who looted in south London put it: "People with the Ralph, the Gucci, the Nike, the trainers, the Air Forces [Nike Air Force 1 trainers], it's all the style, just everyone wants it. If you don't have it you're just going to look like an idiot. Like, that's how we see it, you just look like an idiot. It's a fashion thing."” (source) (related)

Helen Clifton:

“Boy, 16, who was convicted of theft during the Birmingham riots: …

“"What I really noticed that day was that we had control. It felt great. We could do what we wanted to do. We could do as much damage as we can, and we could not be stopped.

“"Normally the police control us. But the law was obeying us, know what I mean?"” (source) (related)

— Referrals to readings elsewhere —

George Pór:

“Given that collective thinking is an essential part of our movement, it shouldn’t be restricted to “same place & same time” settings. The Future of Occupy initiative aims at using the best tools and methods of the arts and sciences of collective intelligence for expanding the scope of the our distributed genius from physical places to virtual spaces, and doing so, connecting better the local and global dimensions of the movement.” (source) (follow-up by Mark Jagdev)

Berkeley Journal of Sociology:

“This forum is designed to bring together essays, critical commentary, and eventually research of social scientists on the Occupy Movement. As analyses and “spin” of Occupations grow, we confront the sort of public issue to which a social science response is urgently needed. Accordingly, the BJS has organized this forum addressing the underlying social, political, and economic issues surrounding Occupy and its broader implications.” (source)

Society and Space:

“Greetings! We asked members of the Society and Space editorial board and friends to share brief reflections on the ‘Occupy’ movement. We are delighted to share the first installment, which includes pieces by Ananya Roy, Eduardo Mendieta, Juliet Fall, Elena Trubina, Deborah Bird Rose, Justin Clemens, Marlies Glasius, Marieke de Goede, Society & Space editor Stuart Elden, and photos from Kathryn Yusoff. We will continue to post reflections as they come in over the next few weeks, so check back regularly! Future posts will come from Anna Tsing, Kathryn Yusoff, Craig Jeffrey, and others.” (source)

Indiana University (Bloomington) Department of English Graduate Students:

“Call for Proposals: "Occupied: Taking up Space and Time"

“We are issuing a Call for Proposals for scholarly and creative submissions for an International Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference entitled “Occupied: Taking up Space and Time” to be held at Indiana University - Bloomington from March 22-24, 2012. This 9th annual conference is hosted by the graduate students of the IU Department of English.

“Recent calls to occupy space for indefinite durations have provoked us to consider what it means to occupy or to be occupied both spatially and temporally.” (source)

* * * * *

Many thanks to posts by Michel Bauwens and his P2P Foundation blog for initially pointing out many of the foregoing readings.

Many thanks to Richard O'Neill, director of the Highlands Group and Highlands Forum, for his overall interest and encouragement.

What the Occupy Protests Mean: A TIMN Interpretation (Part II)

2011-12-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

[UPDATE — December 27, 2011: I’ve edited a bit, mostly to add a few new readings to the addendum, and to link to just-posted Part III. I’ve also newly amended Part I today.]

What’s here is the second of a multi-part post on the Occupy movements, presented as though it amounts to notes for a briefing. Combined, they address selected aspects of the causes (Part I), conduct (Part II), cognition (Part III), and consequences (Part IV [pending]) of the protests. The posts are mostly done from a TIMN perspective about social evolution, but Part III is also done from a cognitive STA (space-time-action) perspective, in a nod to this blog’s other theme besides TIMN.

* * * * *

Part II: On the Conduct of the Occupy Protest Movements

As noted at the end of Part I, the Occupy movements are doing more than other movements to express and propel the rise of the network (+N) form of organization. They will succeed to the extent that they continue to do so, presuming it’s in a constructive manner (to be discussed in Part IV).

To my knowledge, many ways in which the Occupy protesters are advancing the rise of the network (+N) form arose with the key “social netwars” of the 1990s: the Zapatista movement in Mexico, and the Battle of Seattle. Yet, other activist movements have mattered as well, such that by now a vast deep infrastructure exists for conducting activist campaigns across all sorts of issue areas and boundaries.

Points that seem significant to me, based on past research on organization, strategy, and narrative matters, are as follows:

• Organization matters: The Occupy protesters are trying to operate as a 21st C. information-age network — in many respects a peer-to-peer (P2P) network — whose design is ostensibly open, inclusive, horizontal, bottom-up, decentralized, collective, leaderless, and non-hierarchical, even anti-hierarchical.

* This is most noticeable in their efforts at direct democracy in general assemblies held in parks and other Occupied spaces. These assemblies, as well as their lateral working groups, adhere to those design principles in ways that reflect modern anarchist thinking, but also strive to enact cutting-edge network notions (especially about collective intelligence and open-source creativity and productivity) that have taken hold irrespective of any overlap with anarchism.

* Various pluses and minuses, lots of praise and criticism, have attended these exercises in direct democracy (see readings in the Addendum). Yet there’s a broader TIMN matter to wonder about: Whether this Occupy-type activism really does represent a deepening of new network modes of organization, decision-making, and strategy — or a recursion to classic tribal modes? After all, gathering in open assemblies, providing opportunities for all to voice their views, and using consensus methods to arrive at decisions, without imposing a hierarchy, are what characterize episodes of democracy in (T-type) tribal settings, as do fission and forking by dissidents. If what has been occurring in the Occupy encampments is truly of the new (+N) network form, the movement will manage to resist tribalization (not to mention re-hierarchicalization). But it’s still not clear what the new form will look like at its full-fledged best, and how it will be distinct from and more suitable than the other TIMN forms.

* The answers may not lie in the Occupy encampments. They, their assemblies, and related gatherings have garnered much attention and analysis. And why not? They are the most visible aspects of the Occupy movement. What are missing — yet surely as interesting and potentially more important from a TIMN perspective — are data and analysis about the broader organizational networking that is occurring in the background, surely involving myriad NGOs, media, and other actors all across America and abroad. I’ve seen references to ideas for linking the various assemblies into a vast network; but important as the assemblies are for the Occupy movement, they may not be its key factor, or actor. This may become evident if/as the city encampments become harder to sustain. The key may be the background network (or set of networks), partly because of its “monitory” potential.

* This speaks to a distinction about three kinds of democracy: assembly, representative, and monitory. The efforts at assembly democracy may suit many purposes of Occupy’s encampments, but this early kind of democracy has major limitations as a basis for broad-based governance and long-range evolution. Meanwhile, the Occupy activists have good reasons to be critical and suspicious of what has become of modern representative democracy; though more complex and capable than assembly democracy, it has become deficient for guiding the evolution from triformist to quadriformist societies in the 21st C. Instead, a key to the next phase transition may be “monitory democracy” — a concept from John Keane (2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2010) — whereby vast sensory and organizational apparatuses are developed, especially in civil society, for scrutinizing and appraising what is going on in a society, and for generating policy inputs that require accountability and responsibility from state and market actors. If Occupy’s background network (or set of networks) is headed in this direction, it could make a significant contribution to the emergence of the +N phase. I shall return to this prospect in Part IV.

• Strategy matters: The Occupy protesters are conducting what amounts to a “netwar” — our term for a mode of conflict that revolves around the use of network forms of organization attuned to the information age. In so doing, they are increasingly adopting “swarming” as a strategy and/or set of tactics.

* As John Arquilla and I have commented to each other, 2011 has been the year of social swarming; swarming is the story of the year. And the ideas we fielded about swarming and the future of conflict over a decade ago still look apt:

“Swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, co-ordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or ﬁre, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. This notion of “force and/or ﬁre” may be literal in the case of military or police operations, but metaphorical in the case of NGO activists, who may, for example, be blocking city intersections or emitting volleys of emails and faxes. Swarming will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing — swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to re-combine for a new pulse.” (2000, p. 12)

* So far, the Occupy movement has generated no major incidents that fully manifest swarming. But a lot of statements (see Addendum) speak to its attractiveness; and swarming is implicit in the efforts at multiple occupations — a swarm of occupations. By some accounts, the swarming phase of the Occupy movement is just beginning; if so, it may take the movement in new directions against new targets, perhaps especially if the physical occupations of parks and other sites are ended.

* Recent police and other security operations against the Occupy protests indicate that counter-netwar and counter-swarming methods are being learned, shared, coordinated, and applied across multiple cities and agencies. Particularly notable was the Los Angeles Police Department’s operation to end the encampment there. (See readings in the Addendum, plus chapters by Arquilla and others in this NPS study.)

• Narrative matters: As the information age deepens, conflicts revolve increasingly around narratives — around whose story wins. So far, the Occupy movement has fielded some major slogans and other pointed memes. It’s clearly a movement whose messages are critical of what has happened to capitalism and democracy, and whose proponents hope for solutions to emerge from civil society rather than state or market sectors. Yet, there is still no clear narrative; it’s all quite inchoate — and for now, that appears to be by design, even to make deliberate sense. Occupy activists have opted to promote a nonviolent values-oriented revolution that, so far, is more symbolic than concrete and specific. Many protesters have declined to compile and field specific demands, despite criticisms and pressures to do so. Instead, they have emphasized projecting the kinds of values, morals, and ethics that they think should be brought (back?) into play.

* Occupy’s media strategy is to occupy minds, even more than physical sites. Many activists believe they are creating a new global consciousness. They are out to shift public opinion, public debate, and public will. Yet many protesters are focused on fostering bonds among themselves — connectivity, solidarity — even more than on attacking outside targets and opponents. In large part, Occupy’s key audience is the movement itself — to make it grow, and for supporters to feel they are part of something big that is getting bigger. Some activists deem education to be a major purpose of the movement, especially for the long struggle that is thought to lie ahead.

* The Occupy approach to developing a narrative, or a set of narratives, is being conducted as an open-source multi-voice network, even a marketplace of ideas — not as a sectarian tribe or ideological hierarchy of ideas. This network of ideas revolves around values, goals, and grievances that stem largely from the Left. But it’s also evolving in ways that seem open, adaptable, and resilient, partly to attract adherents from the Center, even the Right. There are key themes — e.g., democracy, equality — but care is being taken not to let any one become singularly or permanently paramount. Indeed, some Occupy activists favor the absence of a precise set of demands and the appearance of disorganization, not only to help attract new people, but also to prevent being co-opted or put in a labeled box by established actors such as political parties and labor unions. Occupy’s network of ideas may thus seem amorphous, but the aim is to make it polymorphous.

* Responsibility is emerging as an important thread. Many Occupy activists talk about rights — Occupy as a continuation of the civil rights revolutions of the 20th C. But I detect an even stronger emphasis on responsibilities — Occupy may develop into a responsibilities revolution more than a rights revolution. Corporate social responsibility and government accountability are already part of the Occupy schemata. If monitory democracy is to take hold in the 21st C., it may make sense for Occupy activists to press on civic responsibilities even harder than on civil rights.

* Nonviolence has been a key thread in Occupy’s narrative from the start. Most Occupy activists are intent on nonviolence as a value and strategy. It is central to their unfolding narrative — the story they want to win with. They’ve had to counter appeals by “black bloc” anarchists, not to mention possible provocateurs, to opt for violence. A point I’d offer, from a TIMN stance, is that setting nonviolence aside — opting for violence — would drive many parties back into tribalism. Moreover, if Occupy turns violent, a street-level realpolitik will become ascendant again, and the movement will splinter and lose its new advantages at noöspolitik (for definition, see next entry).

* Occupy’s narrative directions are in line with our past RAND work on the concept of noöpolitik (or noöspolitik; 1999, 2007), including our forecast that it would gradually supersede realpolitik and favor non-state actors as the information age deepens. No Occupy-related statements have used the term, but many substantiate its conceptual bases:

“By noopolitik we mean an approach to statecraft, to be undertaken as much by nonstate as by state actors, that emphasizes the role of informational soft power in expressing ideas, values, norms, and ethics through all manner of media. This makes it distinct from realpolitik, which stresses the hard, material dimensions of power and treats states as the determinants of world order. Noopolitik makes sense because knowledge is fast becoming an ever stronger source of power and strategy, in ways that classic realpolitik and internationalism cannot absorb. . . .

“Noöpolitik upholds the importance of non–state actors, especially from civil society, and requires that they play strong roles. Why? NGOs (not to mention individuals) often serve as sources of ethical impulses (which is rarely the case with market actors), as agents for disseminating ideas rapidly, and as nodes in networked apparatuses of “sensory organizations” that can assist with conflict anticipation, prevention, and resolution. Indeed, because of the information revolution, advanced societies are on the threshold of developing a vast sensory apparatus for watching what is happening around the world. . . .

“Against this background, the states that emerge strongest in information–age terms — even if by traditional measures they may appear to be smaller, less powerful states — are likely to be the states that learn to work conjointly with the new generation of non–state actors. . . .

“. . . Realpolitik is typically about whose military or economy wins. Noopolitik may ultimately be about whose story wins.” (1999 / 2007)

• Spatial matters: The preceding points about network organization, netwar swarming, and noöspolitik sum up my main impressions about the conduct of the Occupy protests from a TIMN perspective. In addition, I’ve spotted a lot of interesting activity around the concept of “space” — what it means to occupy and fight for a space, to penetrate physical vs. media spaces, to create and hold sacred spaces without fetishizing them, to convert private into public spaces and both into common spaces or even “temporary autonomous zones” (TAZs). The importance of spatial thinking also echoes in referents, often metaphorical, to opening avenues, overcoming barriers, avoiding being put in a box, making connections, building bridges, disrupting capitalist webs, and upholding the dignity of the individual, yet keeping identity obscure. And of course, much is still made of how the new information and communications technologies alter the nature of space (and time).

* There are ways to relate all this to TIMN — e.g., by reiterating that each of the TIMN forms involves preferences for particular space-time action orientations; or by noting that many spatial references by Occupy activists occur in the context of commenting on the matters discussed above — network organization, netwar swarming, and media strategies. Doing so would justify expanding on the point in this post.

* But besides TIMN, the point relates more to this blog’s other focus: how and why people’s space-time-action orientations (STA) shape their mindsets and behavior patterns. So I’m going to elaborate on the point in a separate Part III post. I’ll put in its addendum a large set of readings that I’ve compiled about spatial orientations written by Occupy activists and observers.

Wrap-up comment #1: The Occupy movement has conducted itself as an organizational network, and much as a network should. It is helping pioneer the rise of the +N form, and thus augurs the emergence of a quadriformist society. It has some tribal characteristics — and in some places it seems to oscillate between its tribal and network potentials. But it keeps resisting a reversion to the tribal form, and co-optation into established institutional and market folds.

This makes it quite different from the Tea Party movement. Despite a few network characteristics, it was originally quite tribal in form. Moreover, it longed for a rectification of America at its triformist best. And much of it has ended up being co-opted by established institutional and market actors who represent the triformist era. Tea Party activists used social networking, but that’s different from being committed to the rise of the (+N) network form of organization.

Wrap-up comment #2: In focusing this post on the Occupy movement in the United States, I’ve rather neglected the conduct of related movements elsewhere around the world. It seems to me, however, that they (or at least their cutting-edge activists) manifest quite similar themes about the appeal of open-source network organization, direct democracy, netwar swarming, noöpolitik, and strategic nonviolence — shaped and qualified, of course, by local conditions.

Such similarities appear elsewhere partly because these activists are all trying to connect, inspire, and learn from each other. Indeed, as some of the Addendum readings document, activists who have mounted protests in places as far apart as Buenos Aires, Cairo, Madrid, London, New York, and, Tunis, sense that they are creating an interconnected world-wide movement for societal transformations that will curtail patrimonial corporatism and enable a truer democracy.

Potential consequences and implications will be discussed in Part IV.

* * * * *

ADDENDUM: READINGS FOR PART II

A collection of quotes, gleaned from browsing online write-ups about Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and related protests elsewhere. Inclusion does not mean approval, only that I sense a bearing on matters raised in the main text of this post. Arranged according to whether a quote speaks mainly to the causes (Part I), conduct (Part II), cognition (Part III), or consequences (Part IV) of the protests.

In my initial notion of doing a post or two on the causes and consequences of the Occupy protests, I did not plan to discuss how they were conducted. But then, unexpectedly, I started seeing statements about swarming as an approach to strategy and tactics — a theme in John Arquilla’s and my past work. I also saw discussions about direct democracy in general assemblies that seemed to reflect tribal practices (the T in TIMN). And I was impressed by statements about the symbolic imagery the activists sought to project — for they seemed in line with our past work on information strategy and the future-oriented concept of noöpolitik. And threading through a lot of this were statements about spatial concepts, such as autonomous zones — a theme that relates to my interest in people’s space-time-action orientations (this blog’s secondary focus, aka STA). Thus, I’ve ended up accumulating lots of materials that relate to — even confirm — our past Rand research. The Occupy movement is turning into quite a laboratory for further inquiry.

So I’ve opted to do this separate post on the conduct of the Occupy protests, and to present my accumulation of related readings, plus a few remarks, as follows below. A large set of readings about spatial orientations that relate more to cognitive STA matters will appear in a separate post in the near future.

Conduct of the protests: direct democracy in general assemblies — These quotes relate the protesters’ preferences for open general assemblies whose organizational design is ostensibly leaderless and non-hierarchical, in order to heighten participation, discussion, and consensus-building. It’s a design that draws on anarchist thinking about direct democracy. While it seems — even aspires — to generate an approach to democracy that is based on modern (+N) network principles, I continue to feel that aspects hark back more to classic (T-type) tribal principles.

Nathan Schneider:

“Get ready for jargon: the General Assembly is a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought, and it’s akin to the assemblies that have been driving recent social movements around the world, in places like Argentina, Egypt’s Tahrir Square, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and so on. Working toward consensus is really hard, frustrating and slow. But the occupiers are taking their time. When they finally get to consensus on some issue, often after days and days of trying, the feeling is quite incredible. . . .

“Fortunately, though, they don’t need to come to consensus about everything. Working alongside the General Assembly are an ever-growing number of committees and working groups—from Food and Media to Direct Action and Sanitation. Anyone is welcome to join one, and they each do their own thing, working in tacit coordination with the General Assembly as a whole. In the end, the hope is that every individual is empowered to make decisions and act as her or himself, for the good of the group.” (source)

David Graeber (as summarized by Matt Wasserman):

“In Direct Action, Graeber fleshes out an argument that he has made elsewhere: The ideology of the alter-globalization movement was contained in its practice. What seemed to outside observers like a chaotic mish-mash of messages at protests staged by Marxist groups was actually a conscious choice to allow a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed. And what seemed like a tedious attention to meeting process was the result of a commitment to direct democracy and rejection of a politics of representation in favor of a politics of participation. Instead of focusing solely, or even largely, on ends, the global justice movement focused on means, attempting to live out its ideals in the present and sneak moments of liberation on the sly. . . .

“While anarchists formed the avant-garde of the global justice movement, they generally did not try to convert other protesters and sympathizers to an explicit belief system. Instead of pushing a party line, they spread practices, advocating the adoption of affinity groups, consensus-based decision-making and spokescouncils. Graeber argues that the Direct Action Network, the most significant organization of the global justice movement, while short-lived, was extraordinarily successful in diffusing a directly democratic model of organizing.” (source)

Dave Pollard:

“From what I have seen, the major challenge the Occupy groups are dealing with is about who is authorized to do what on behalf of, or binding upon, participants, without infringing on individual participants’ autonomy. . . .

“It will be interesting to see how the Metamovement evolves processes and positions on matters of authority, responsibility, representation and power. These are issues, after all, that are at the heart of the Metamovement’s dissatisfaction with the de facto rule by the corporatist 1%.” (source)

Jeff Jarvis:

“. . . #OccupyWallStreet, to me, is about institutional failure. And so it is appropriate that #OccupyWallStreet itself is not run as an institution. . . .

“Now one needs a network. #OccupyWallStreet is that network, the headless tail. Even it's not sure what it is. . . .

“What's happening is an attempt to define a new public, now that we can. . . .

“What #OccupyWallStreet has done with considerable success -- as the best hashtags and publics do -- is open a conversation, one we must have, about the shape of our nation and society and future. If you don't like their manifesto and demands, fine: What are yours?” (source)

Doug Henwood:

“An agenda—and an organization, and some kind of leadership that could speak and be spoken to—would violate these rules. Distilling things down to a simple set of demands would be hierarchical, and commit a crime of exclusion. Having an organization with some sort of leadership would force some to speak for others, the crime of representation.

“But without those things, as Jodi says, there can be no politics.” (source)

Michael Albert:

“As they first formed, the assemblies were invigorating and uplifting. We were creating a new community, I was told. We were making new friends. We were hearing from new people. We were enjoying an environment where dissent was the norm. But as days passed, and then weeks, it got too familiar. And it wasn’t obvious to folks what more they could do. There weren’t tasks to undertake. We weren’t being born anymore, we were dying. It was hard. For many it was impossible to keep learning and keep contributing. There was a will, but there was not a way. Folks didn’t have meaningful things to do that made them feel part of a worthy project. We felt, in time, only part of a mass of people. . . .

“Folks recounted all these dynamics very graphically and movingly. No one said that people stopped participating in assemblies because of fear or the cops or depression over the newspapers. No one said people left because they had developed doubts about protest or resistance, much less about the condition of society. Instead, everyone I spoke with, and it was a lot of very committed people, told me participants left due to lacking good reasons to stay. The bottom line was that the assemblies got tedious and, ironically, even disempowering. Folks wondered, why must I be here every day and every night? The thought nagged. It led to legions moving on. . . .

“Ideas that resonated in the many discussions, and that activists involved felt needed preponderant support, included: once an occupation has a lot of people, have subgroups initiate other occupations in more places, all federated together and providing one another mutual aid. In the most local, neighborhood occupations, visit every home. Talk with every resident. Involve as many neighbors as possible. Determine real felt needs. If what is most upsetting neighbors is housing concerns, daycare issues, traffic patterns, mutual aid, loneliness, whatever, try to act to address the problems.” (source)

Tom Atlee:

“. . .The modified consensus processes currently used by Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy initiatives are extremely powerful tools. Their power comes primarily from their ability to enable a group to include all the voices, insights, and energies of its members in making high quality, readily implementable decisions. But this power assumes a level of shared values, shared purpose, shared reality, shared intention. Its vulnerability lies in its effort to include voices and energies that come from people who do not share the same values, intentions, and worldviews. Ideally we want to include everyone and everything. But this effort can lead us into extremes of chaos from which our community may not emerge intact.” (source)

Adam Elkus:

“ . . . The movement has become consumed with its own internal dynamics at the expense of pushing a larger message. And it’s not simply a matter of message — the functions described in the link roundup, such as internal politics, freeloaders at encampments, issues of self-management, sanitation, and crime themselves are serious problems that threaten the organization’s ability to maintain itself.

“So why is the movement having such difficulty in maintaining a strategic focus, especially after we were told by a bevy of social media gurus that they were utilizing a hitherto superior method of organization rooted in decentralization, co-production, and social networking that would enshrine a new era of participatory politics? A method that was so self-evidently superior that it rendered the idea of goals or strategies passe? . . .

“The idea inherent in much of the OWS strategic commentary is that information-age social networks could help the occupiers build up a strategic infrastructure through viral replication. . . .

“However, such an infrastructure, once built, has its own upkeep costs—which can be steep.” (source)

Mike Davis:

“Fifth, as we learned the hard way in the 1960s, consensual democracy is not identical to participatory democracy. For affinity groups and communes, consensus decision-making may work admirably, but for any large or long-term protest, some form of representative democracy is essential to allow the broadest and most equal participation. The devil, as always, is in the details: ensuring that any delegate can be recalled, formalizing rights of political minorities, guaranteeing affirmative representation, and so on.” (source)

David Wearing:

“In Britain, critics of the Occupy movement have cited the numerous causes espoused by the protesters as a sign of their incoherence of purpose. In reality, the protesters understand that a complex but nevertheless identifiable system – which puts profit and power before people – is responsible for a wide range and variety of malign outcomes, . . . They have therefore taken up the duty abrogated by the political class to subject those choices, and that system, to proper critical scrutiny and challenge, within the particular context of their own local circumstances. That is the connection between Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, the City of London, and scores of other locations worldwide.” (source)

Sveinung Legard:

“New social movements based on open assemblies are emerging in ever more places in Europe and North America as a response to bank bailouts, unemployment, austerity measures and growing economic inequalities. This is not the first time in history that assembly movements have appeared, and there is a great deal to be learned from the gains and mistakes of such past experiences.

“One of the most recent instances appeared in Argentina in what has been called the first rebellion against neoliberalism in the 21st century. . . .

“Most of the assemblies in Buenos Aires sprung up in December 2001 and the first few months of 2002, but by the end of 2002 and early 2003 most of the assemblies had already disappeared and the movement had lost its momentum. Thompson offers two main explanations of why the assembly movement so rapidly vanished. The first is the exhaustion of its members due to the involvement and actions of political parties. The second is the concessions made by the government to the demands of the assembly movement, and the subsequent return of their trust in the state political system.” (source) (alternate)

Asmaa Mahfouz:

“Movements today are truly global. They work in symbiosis, learning from and imitating each others' strategies. Occupy Wall Street reflects this: the call for Occupy protests came from Canada, the General Assembly structure came from Spain, and the outcry of "We are the 99%" came from Italy. Many occupiers took inspiration from our Tahrir Square; now, the Occupy movement across the United States is inspiring us in Egypt.” (source)

Patrick Bruner:

“Well, I think there are many reasons why this has worked. You know, obviously, we have a great history behind us. Tahrir Square, the indignados in Spain—these are movements that are, you know, very, very similar to our movement, you know, the way that we are organized: direct democracy, egalitarian values. These are things that we think deserve to be central in every movement, and we think that’s a big reason why we have been successful, is that our tactics and our values and our goals, they’re all the same.” (source)

Conduct of the protests: social netwar and swarming — Since John Arquilla and I did so much writing about swarming, and the future of conflict over a decade ago (esp. 1998, 2000, 2001), I’ve zeroed in on a spate of statements that highlight network organization and swarming (and counter-swarming) strategies and tactics in the conduct of the Occupy protests. The spread of social swarming by activists may well be the story of the year. Counter-swarming by police may turn into one of next year’s big stories.

[ADDENDUM — January 23, 2012: For additional background and references about swarming, see a long comment I left at the ZenPundit blog a while back. Also see a mostly-similar earlier discussion in a post here at my blog.]

Marcia Stepanek:

“No doubt, Occupy is both a political movement and an early example of how the Net is profoundly enabling a reshaping of the status quo at multiple levels. Occupy's loose-knit web of hyper-agile, group-led "adhocracies" are — thanks to our growing addiction to social media — both inevitable and impossible to ignore. Can such digital organizations topple governments as we know them? If you count the Arab Spring movements, they already have. What's not so obvious is what comes next.” (source)

Rick Falkvinge:

“At the bottom line, what sets a Swarm apart from traditional organizations is its blinding speed of operation, its next-to-nothing operating costs, and its large number of very devoted volunteers. Traditional corporations and democratic institutions appear to work at glacial speeds from the inside of a Swarm. That’s also why a Swarm can change the world: it runs in circles around traditional organizations, in terms of quality and quantity of work, as well as in resource efficiency.” (source)

Tim Rayner:

“Last week, the movement crossed a threshold. A localized set of swarm events evolved into a distributed swarm network. . . .

“OccupyWallStreet is a new kind of political movement. . . . the movement is political, but this is a different kind of politics, which seeks to circumnavigate the tactics and fora of established political action. . . .

“OccupyWallStreet is not a political movement in the traditional sense. It is a countercultural swarm. We need to see it as a swarm to understand why people are drawn to it, and what makes it the most important political force on the planet today. . . .

“Swarm movements shape identity in a completely different way. First off, they are issue- or cause-based, rather than identity-based, movements. Instead of seeking to reduce the movement to a single set of grievances representing the struggles of a single group identity, swarm movements affirm the diversity of participants as their fundamental strength. This diversity is irreducible to a single identity, but it is powerful when focused on a common cause. . . .

”Swarms are vectors of mass transformation. They sweep across societies on the diagonal and reset political cultures in their wake. The protesters in Liberty Square and across the US are engaged in a more serious business than contesting dominant institutions. They are knitting together new cognitive maps based on peer-to-peer strategies and open source ethics and reworking politics from below.” (source)

Kevin Carson:

“Today’s movements . . . arise in a world where the Web’s networked many-to-many architecture and the “individual super-empowerment” resulting from free global platforms enable individuals to take on giant institutions as equals. Networked movements, with virtually no permanent administrative apparatus, swarm giant institutions without warning and far beyond their power to cope.” (source)

Nathan Schneider:

“Small groups acting more or less autonomously toward common goals is a matter of principle as well as of pragmatism. These groups, in turn, can voluntarily coordinate with each other in spokescouncils. Operating this way reflects the kind of values that many in the occupation movement insist on: individual autonomy, consensus decision making, decentralization, and equality. . . .

“We already know that power structures which rely on violence are helpless against coordinated nonviolent action. During the civil rights movement, a highly structured and disciplined action in a segregated city like a sit-in or Freedom Ride had the capacity to confront the system in a very direct way, presenting the powerful a dilemma between violent overreaction and capitulation. Such actions, however, have since turned ritualized and generally ineffective in American protest movements. But Occupy Wall Street commends to us the anarchist insight that, in much the same way, hierarchical command structures are highly vulnerable to non-hierarchical action. . . .

“Diversity of tactics is a form of political disobedience par excellence, as its emphasis on autonomy rather than authority represents a direct contradiction to the kind of order that ordinary politics presupposes.” (source)

Jack DuVall:

“The ultimate object of this is to overstretch an opponent’s resources and capacity to maintain the status quo — so that its own supporters and enforcers begin to doubt whether the existing system can be operated satisfactorily for very long. No oppressive or abusive system which is opposed by a popular, civilian-based movement is forever implacable; those who defend the system can lose their morale (or even resign or defect) as readily as that can happen to a movement, prompting the opponent to stand down or settle on terms advantageous to the people. The challenge for a movement is how to plan, innovate and sequence tactics so as to force that result.” (source)

Shlok Vaidya:

“OWS currently consists of thousands/millions/hundreds of millions of cognitive nodes:

• Connecting/infecting new nodes. As part of this, the organization is generating memes, testing against live audiences, and dropped if counterproductive. Trying to build sufficient capacity before…

• Probing attack vectors. A botnet, like a storm, emphasizes growth of its own capacity before attacking (or raining). Mild DDoS on the Brooklyn bridge or around the Bank of America in SF. Anonymous phishing for corruption, etc. This is enabled by…

• Decentralized command and control. Perhaps more specifically, modular design. Each protest in each city is led by independent affiliates (if not further broken down). Crashing a protest in Ohio has no impact on the rest of the network.” (source)

Mattathias Schwartz:

“Lasn and White quickly hammered out a post-Zuccotti plan. White would draft a new memorandum, suggesting that Phase I—signs, meetings, camps, marches—was now over. Phase II would involve a swarming strategy of “surprise attacks against business as usual,” with the potential to be “more intense and visceral, depending on how the Bloombergs of the world react.” . . .

“No matter what happens next, the movement’s center is likely to shift from the N.Y.C.G.A., just as it shifted from Adbusters, and form somewhere else, around some other circle of people, ideas, and plans.” (source)

Conduct of the protests: counter-netwar and counter-swarming — Since these readings keep growing, I’ve separated out the ones that mostly concern police and other security responses.

Pundita:

“In short, the swarm attack is best met with counter-swarms — often comprised of local police and civilians working together or in tandem. . . .

“In an era when far more deadly adversaries than the criminals who wreaked havoc in England are combining swarm tactics with sophisticated communications technologies, recognizing that well-prepared civilians can play a key role in successful counter-swarm tactics is vital to a nation’s security.” (source)

Marcia Stepanek:

“The raid against Occupy Wall Street came just days after similar actions to break up Occupy Portland and Occupy Oakland -- and a half-day before Occupy Toronto, Occupy Calgary, Occupy Zurich and Occupy London were similarly confronted by authorities. . . .

“On Monday, the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which conceived of the movement -- and apparently aware of the multi-city crackdowns yet to come -- said the protesters should “declare victory” and head indoors to strategize. "OWS isn't a geographical place so much as it is an idea and an attitude," spokewoman Balicki said.” (source)

Shawn Gaynor:

“As cities across America evict encampments of the Occupy Wall Street movement, similarities of timing, talking points and tactics among major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs have led critics to wonder: Is some sort of national coordination going on? . . .

“But a little-known but influential private membership based organization has placed itself at the center of advising and coordinating the crackdown on the encampments. The Police Executive Research Forum, an international non-governmental organization with ties to law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has been coordinating conference calls with major metropolitan mayors and police chiefs to advise them on policing matters and discuss response to the Occupy movement. The group has distributed a recently published guide on policing political events. . . .

“These current and former U.S. police chiefs -- along with top ranking police union officials and representatives from Canadian and British police -- have been marketing to municipal police forces and politicians their joint experiences as specialists on policing mass demonstrations.” (source) (more) (contrary critique)

Norm Stamper:

“My support for a militaristic solution caused all hell to break loose. Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were smashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the streets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging the conflict. The “Battle in Seattle,” as the WTO protests and their aftermath came to be known, was a huge setback—for the protesters, my cops, the community.

“More than a decade later, the police response to the Occupy movement, most disturbingly visible in Oakland—where scenes resembled a war zone and where a marine remains in serious condition from a police projectile—brings into sharp relief the acute and chronic problems of American law enforcement. Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, US police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

“The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country.” (source)

Brayden King:

“A few comments: This video, and others, illustrates a new era in the policing of protest. Now, basically any protest of significant size will likely be recorded by bystanders with smartphones. For example, when a protester was injured by Oakland police a few weeks ago, there was a video showing that the guy was just standing around. The immediate question is how the administration will deal. So far, badly. The long term question is how police departments will change in an age where everything is filmed.” (source)

John Robb:

“In short, bots will increasingly allow a VERY small group of people (in our case, a small group of plutocrats that act as the world's economic central planners) to amplify their power/dominance in a the physical world to a degree never seen before.” (source)

“It is reasonable to project that in a mere five years, a protest like Occupy Wall Street wouldn't be possible. Here's a scenario to get your head around how things will change due to the introduction of bots (every bit of tech seen below is available and in most cases deployed already):” (source)

Matt Taibi:

“And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.

“But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.” (source)

Naomi Wolf:

“So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.” (source)

Conduct of the protests: symbolic narratives and noopolitik — Many statements explain why the protesters have refused to compile and field specific policy demands, despite outside criticisms and pressures to do so. Instead, they have emphasized projecting the kinds of values, morals, and ethics that they think should brought (back?) into play. Education is deemed a key purpose, especially for the long struggle that is thought to lie ahead. Moreover, the protesters seem interested more in fostering bonds among themselves — solidarity — than in influencing outsiders. There is a media strategy to occupy minds, not just the physical environs. This reminds me of our RAND work on the concept of noöpolitik (1999, 2007), including our forecast that it would supersede realpolitik and favor nonstate actors as the information age deepens.

George Lakoff:

“I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed.

“It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail. . . .

“Remember: The Tea Party sees itself as stressing only individual responsibility. The Occupation Movement is stressing both individual and social responsibility.” (source) (alternate)

Matt Taibi:

"I would imagine the end game of any movement against Wall Street corruption is going to involve some very elaborate organization. There are going to have to be consumer and investor boycotts, shareholder revolts, criminal prosecutions, new laws passed, and other moves. But a good first step is making people aware of the battle lines." (source)

Alexis Madrigal:

GET Strategy/open source ideology: From the beginning, the occupation was meant to take on a life of its own. Organizers and occupiers alike have not tried to maintain control of the message or methodology for spreading ideas or occupations. Anyone who wants to support Occupy Wall Street can just do something, trusting they'll be able to connect to the movement. Hence OccupyHistory and hundreds of like sites. . . .

GET Infrastructure/network amplification: Though the number of people in any individual occupation has tended to be small (relative to the biggest civil rights marches, say), thenumber of people acting as network amplifiers has been large. Bloggers like BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin have become key nodes for disseminating information as have internal activists. . . .

POST Idea/inadequacy of politics: Approval of Congress and President Obama are near all-time lows. The idea that our politics are not up to the serious tasks we face in fixing our economy and society has become widespread. Instead of pointing that out, as many have, Occupy Wall Street simply ignored mainstream politics. As the press clamored for position papers and lists of demands, OWS responded by paying no attention. There were two messages in that relative silence: 1) your media is inadequate to convey the scale of changes necessary and 2) your politics are inadequate to make the scale of changes necessary.” (source)

Richard Kim:

“OWS organizers are, moreover, acutely aware that the movement’s extraordinary potential lies in its ability to bring together a range of participants who coalesce maybe once in a generation: anarchists and Marxists of a thousand different sects, social democrats, community organizers, immigrants’ rights activists, feminists, queers, anti-racist organizers, capitalists who want to save capitalism by restoring the Fordist truce, the simply curious and sympathetic. Republicans like Eric Cantor have denigrated Occupy Wall Street as “a mob,” and the right-wing press has raised the specter of “anarchism” to distinguish OWS from populism. But it is, in fact, the movement’s emphasis on direct democracy, derived from anarchism, that has allowed such an unwieldy set of actors to occupy the same space. . . .

“At the moment, the movement’s energy is overwhelmingly directed at keeping this fusion of forces alive, to focus on what unifies—the common belief, for example, that capitalism is out of control and that the political system has broken down—rather than what divides; and to debate without hard preconceptions a range of solutions. As Kobi Skolnick, an Israeli-American activist who comes out of the peace movement, put it, “Socialism is a great idea. Anarchism is a great idea. Moderating capitalism is a great idea. We can’t afford to have an either/or mentality anymore.” It’s a message that even Occupy Wall Street’s revolutionaries can get down with, for now. As Alexandre Carvalho says, “We are on a path that goes to revolution, but it can pass through reform.”

“In this early stage, the movement seems both extremely fragile and extremely potent. The threats of police action, internal rancor, negative public opinion and burnout all loom; like the winter, some of those perils are unavoidable. But so far the Occupiers have pulled off a remarkable feat—to summon all the specters of left history and yet slip past the fatal noose of infighting. Who knows how long this will last? If it does, perhaps the culture of anarchism will be remembered as the left’s exonerator instead of as its hangman’s knot.” (source)

Peter Marcuse:

“The real support that non-occupying supporters can give the Occupy Wall Street movement, then, is to draw from it the conclusion that the time is right to go on the offensive, to move from Real Politiik to principled politics, to expose and attack the real roots of social injustice rather than only ameliorate their worst manifestations. If they are being accused of not formulating concrete and feasible programs to achieve their clear goals, there are plenty of other organizations and individuals around who can do so. Rather than blaming the occupiers for not doing it, let those who are working within the system re-double their efforts. The occupation movement is no substitute for the labor movement, for urban social movements, for radical think tanks, for insurgent political organization; it is rather a call to arms for their further mobilization.” (source)

“In this sense, claims of rights, perhaps in the form of manifestoes, rather than political laundry lists of demands, are indeed the way to go: understanding rights as statements of principles, sharp enough to reveal concrete positions on broad topics, perhaps with examples, but not confined to specifics. Occupy Wall Street is not a lobbying movement, but a movement for social change.” (source)

Mike Davis:

“Today, as the Occupy movements debate whether or not they need more concrete political definition, we need to understand what demands have the broadest appeal while remaining radical in an anti-systemic sense. Some young activists might put their Bakunin, Lenin, or Slavoj Zizek temporarily aside and dust off a copy of FDR’s 1944 campaign platform: an Economic Bill of Rights. . . .

“Today, of course, an Economic Bill of Rights is both an utterly utopian idea and a simple definition of what most Americans existentially need.

“But the new movements, like the old, must at all cost occupy the terrain of fundamental needs, not of short-term political "realism."” (source)

Chris Hedges:

“. . . We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us. . . .

“The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies.” (source)

Kevin Carson:

“Far more important than anything Occupy Wall Street achieves as a pressure movement, is what it will achieve as an education movement, teaching people ways to sustain themselves through peaceful production, cooperation, sharing and trade with other producers — all outside the corporate system. Far more important than what the demonstrators brought with them to Zuccotti Park will be what they take back home with them — a toolkit for fighting the system from where they live. Or as I put it in my previous column, “a general strike producing for ourselves.”” (source)

Dave Pollard:

“The real purpose of the Metamovement, at least in North America and perhaps Europe, is not to get the corrupt political and economic corporatist 1% to cede power, or to reform itself, or to compel political leaders to dismantle it or tax it fairly or reform it on threat of replacing them with leaders who will. Only the hapless Tea Party faction of the Metamovement is naive enough to believe that can or will happen.

“The real purpose of the Metamovement, I would argue, is to re-engage the 99%, from the bottom up, community by community around the world, first to learn how things really work and what is really going on, and then to decide what actions need to be taken in response. In every nation and community the situation is different and the response that is needed will inevitably be different.

“The purpose of the Metamovement is education and then organization.” (source)

Michael Kennedy:

“To the extent direct actions are non-violent, to the extent they highlight the violence rained on those who occupy Tahrir Squares across the world, to the extent they begin to highlight not only the negative consequences of the 1%’s disproportionate influence within nations, but also the global flows of weapons across nations that reinforce injustices, we see not only a new expression of solidarity. We see a new meaning of solidarity too. This solidarity is not only about recognition and affirmation of those most like the Occupy movement. This solidarity recognizes the difference in struggles across the world, imagines the connections that make those struggles both similar and different, and shows how solidarity can be consequential. This could be consequential solidarity in the short run, and a different geopolitics in the long run.” (source)

Noam Chomsky:

“If the bonds and associations being established in these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead, victories don’t come quickly, the Occupy protests could mark a significant moment in American history. . . .

“The most exciting aspect of the Occupy movement is the construction of the linkages that are taking place all over. If they can be sustained and expanded, Occupy can lead to dedicated efforts to set society on a more humane course.” (source)

McKenzie Wark:

“The occupation isn't actually on Wall Street, of course. And while there is actually a street called Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, “Wall Street” is more of a concept, an abstraction. So what the occupation is doing is taking over a little (quasi) public square in the general vicinity of Wall Street in the financial district and turning it into something like an allegory. Against the abstraction of Wall Street, it proposes another, perhaps no less abstract story. . . .

“The taking of a tiny square in downtown New York hardly impinges on the power of the vector. It doesn’t even inconvenience the minions who work in the surrounding offices, but the actual occupation is connected to a more abstract kind of occupation, and the slightest hint that it could spread disturbs the fragile constitutions of the rentier sensibility. . . .

“The abstraction that is the occupation is then a double one, an occupation of a place, somewhere near the actual Wall Street; and the occupation of the social media vector, with slogans, images, videos, stories. . . .

“An occupation is conceptually the opposite of a movement. A movement aimed for some internal consistency within itself but uses space just as a place to park its ranks. An occupation has no internal consistency in its ranks but chooses meaningful spaces which have significant resonance into the abstract terrain of symbolic geography. . . .

“That it just doesn't do some of the things social movements do is part of why its working, at least so far. . . . For those who want a theory to go with the practice, you will have to look elsewhere than to Negri or Badizek (Badiou+Zizek). There's no multitude; there's no vanguard. . . .

“So as to how this plays out, nobody knows. That's how it is with weird global media events. It's a test of wills. . . . The key is keeping the focus on the abstraction that is Wall Street, the pernicious effects of which pretty much everyone feels in their daily life.” (source)

David Carr:

“After last week’s dead-of-night operation in New York to break up the protest site in Zuccotti Park, and similar actions in other cities, it is inevitable that Occupy Wall Street will eventually become more of an idea than a place. . . .

“. . . Still, Occupy Wall Street left many all revved up with no place to go. In addition to the 5 W’s — who, what, when, where and why — the media are obsessed with a sixth: what’s next? Occupy Wall Street, for all its appeal as a story, is very hard to roll forward.

“But if Occupy Wall Street seems inchoate and short on answers, it has plenty of company. . . .

“The people who make up Occupy Wall Street know enough to sense that a tipping point is at hand. Regardless of how the movement proceeds now that it is not gathered around campfires, its impact on the debate could be lasting and significant. If the coming election ends up being framed in terms of “fairness,” the people who took to the streets, battled the police and sat through those endless general assembly meetings will know that even though their tents are gone, their footprint remains.” (source)

Nathan Jurgenson:

“The narrative, the symbolic framing of the event specifically and the movement in general, once again, is in the hands of the protesters themselves. Unsure how to cover the movement, much of the traditional press has largely ignored Occupy with respect to the issues at stake. However, police brutality filmed by the protesters themselves has proven to be a powerful tool to capture national attention and sympathy on behalf of the movement.

“The police, once again, treated the crowd as if they only existed in physical space. But the crowd took photos, livestreamed and once again took charge of the symbolism. The lasting images of the raid have massive symbolic power: hundreds of officers dressed in heavy riot-gear looking prepared to handle terrorists or a dangerous drug cartel were barreling down instead on a couple hundred unarmed peaceful campers. The draconian and seemingly hyperbolic display of force proves powerfully symbolic in further reifying the “us” versus “them” framework Occupy has so far successfully pushed. . . .

“Police efforts to clear Occupations across the United States continue to grow (so far, occupations have been cleared in Atlanta, Denver, New York City, Oakland, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Halifax in Canada). Thus, the Occupy movement has come to an inflection point: how can it continue to operate at both the level of the symbolic and simultaneously at the level of the physical? That double-punch has been a key to the movement’s success thus far.” (source)

Michael Lerner:

“1. We should be non-violent because it is the right way to treat other human beings created in the image of God, and should not seek to create circumstances in which police violence is inevitably triggered unless we do so by ourselves being totally nonviolent in action and words. I’m in favor of non-violent disruptions of oppressive institutions (e.g. a sit-in in the Bank of America or in a Wall Street firm or in a corporation involved in illegitimate foreclosures or in producing military equipment or at the State Dept or the various offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Services given their vicious processes) as long as we keep a 100% non-violent stance. I do not think people need to sit down and get arrested–though that works in many cases; it is also legitimate to do nonviolent disruptions using mobile tactics in which demonstrators disrupt and then withdraw to disrupt somewhere else–as long as the demonstrators avoid destruction of property or creating a situation in which violence is inevitable. Non-violence does not mean passivity, but it must mean a fundamental respect for human life and for the dignity of human beings, including those with whom we strongly disagree. Our actions must reflect that sense of respect for the humanity of the Other–because that is precisely what is absent from the policies and practices of the 1% and those who do their bidding. 2. Though breaking windows or destroying property is not the same as breaking bones, it is perceived by much of the American public as a wrongful act, and a movement that engages in that activity quickly loses public support and isolates itself no matter how much the American public agrees with its goals. That is why the FBI and other elements of the “security apparatus” of the US government have consistently planted their youngest employees inside social movements with the goal of trying to encourage acts of violence so as to provide an excuse to repress those movements with public approval.

“But non-violence has not been the stance of the inner core at Occupy Oakland.” (source)

Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, and Lauren Ross:

“While we’ve participated in many actions organized with a diversity of tactics, we do not believe that framework is workable for the Occupy Movement. . . .

“The framework that might best serve the Occupy movement is one of strategic nonviolent direct action. Within that framework, Occupy groups would make clear agreements about which tactics to use for a given action. This frame is strategic – it makes no moral judgments about whether or not violence is ever appropriate, it does not demand we commit ourselves to a lifetime of Gandhian pacifism, but it says, ‘This is how we agree to act together at this time.’ It is active, not passive. It seeks to create a dilemma for the opposition, and to dramatize the difference between our values and theirs.” (source)

Josh Healey:

“At the same time as these successes, several crucial questions continue to pop up. Confusion – both amongst the media and some protesters ourselves – about demands, principles, and tactics has led many natural allies and regular folks who are sympathetic to the movement’s goals to refrain from joining in themselves. In response to those sentiments, and in the spirit of solidarity, here are some suggestions for my comrades to consider as we figure our next steps. . . .

“1. The Tents were Great, but It’s Time for Something New ... 2. Acknowledge the Complexity of the 99% ... 3. Beyond Violence vs. Non-Violence: Let’s Talk Responsibility vs. Irresponsibility ... 4. If the Police can Coordinate their Actions, So Can We ...” (source)

Peter Marcuse:

“The Occupation movement that is spreading across the country has a number of purposes, plays a number of different roles, in the struggle for justice and a better life in our world.

“A confrontation function, taking the struggle to the enemy’s territory, . . .

“A symbolic function, The occupations show the existence and extent of a demand for change of many sorts, . . .

“An educational function, provoking questioning, exploration, juxtaposition of differing viewpoints and issues, seeking clarification and sources of commonality within difference. . . .

“A glue function, creating a community of trust and commitment to the pursuit of common goals. . . .

“An umbrella function, creating a space and a format in which quite disparate groups can work together in pursuit of ultimately consistent and mutually reinforcing goals, . . .

“An activation function, inspiring others to greater militancy and sharper focus on common goals and specific demands. . . .

“A model function, showing, by its internal organization and methods of proceeding, that an alternative form of democracy is possible and the process of change need not involve a reversion to hierarchical command structures of some previous revolutionary movements.” (source)

Kalle Lasn (via William Yardley):

“Mr. Lasn said that he and Micah White, a senior editor who helped start Occupy Wall Street, are in regular contact with some prominent protesters but insists they have no interest in a continuing leadership role, nor is it their job to speak for the movement, even if Adbusters would like some credit for starting it.

““This is what Adbusters has done for the past 20 years, to come up with these memes and to propagate them,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about: may the best memes win.”” (source)

John Heilemann:

“It’s perfectly possible that this perception will be borne out, that the raucous events of November 17 were the last gasps of a rigor-mortizing rebellion. But no one seriously involved in OWS buys a word of it. What they believe instead is that, after a brief period of retrenchment, the protests will be back even bigger and with a vengeance in the spring—when, with the unfurling of the presidential election, the whole world will be watching. Among Occupy’s organizers, there is fervid talk about occupying both the Democratic and Republican conventions. About occupying the National Mall in Washington, D.C. About, in effect, transforming 2012 into 1968 redux. . . .

“The most savvy and hard-nosed of the prime movers agree, and think that moment is coming soon. “My take has always been that this movement must move in the shape of an octopus,” says Premo. “The head of the octopus moves forward with a solid critical analysis of our economic and political system, but the octopus has eight tentacles, which can begin to gain concessions. There were organizations within the civil-rights movement that had the demands that allowed everything that was accomplished to be accomplished. The SCLC, CORE, SNCC, all the organizations within that movement had specific goals. And that’s the moment we’re in now, when we’ll probably see our SCLC, our CORE, our SNCC emerge.”

“For that to happen, OWS will need to achieve at least four things. The first is to survive the winter, literally and metaphorically, going into hibernation rather than withering and dying. And in this regard, Mayor Bloomberg’s clearing of Zuccotti Park is likely to prove a boon to the Occupy forces, allowing them to stop expending so much energy on defending space and more on movement-building. The second, as Gitlin puts it, is “dealing with the crazy”—avoiding instances of violence and property destruction that would taint the movement’s image in just the way that Republicans and their media allies are attempting to. The third is that the protesters will need to put the conceit that the movement is leaderless behind them. For OWS to attract new adherents, it must have a clear and compelling voice, amplified by the media. The movement has many candidates who could step up and fill that void, if only the rank and file will permit it.

“Fourth and finally, OWS will need to navigate the fork in the road between radicalism and reformism.” (source)

* * *

For additional readings, see the addendums to Part I, Part III, and Part IV [pending].

Many thanks to posts by Michel Bauwens and his P2P Foundation blog for initially pointing out many of the foregoing readings.

Many thanks to Richard O'Neill, director of the Highlands Group and Highlands Forum, for his overall interest and encouragement.

What the Occupy Protests Mean: A TIMN Interpretation (Part I)

2011-10-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

[UPDATE — December 27, 2011: Significant edits made, including adding basic TIMN points I’d forgotten to mention at the end of the main text, a sidebar that recently occurred to me about 2011 vs. 1848, new readings for the addendum, and links to just-posted Part III.]

What’s here is Part I of what has evolved into a multi-part post about the Occupy movements, presented as though it amounts to notes for a briefing. Combined, the parts address selected aspects of the causes (Part I), conduct (Part II), cognition (Part III), and consequences (Part IV [pending]) of the protests. Most of the posts are done from a TIMN perspective about social evolution. Part III is also about the Occupy protests from a cognitive STA (space-time-action) perspective, in a nod to this blog’s other theme.

* * *

Part I: On the Causes of the Occupy Protest Movements

• The series of protest movements around the world — before, after, and including Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, etc. — have common themes, despite occurring in disparate places with varied participants.

* The driving wedge consists of a new generation of young activists who are well-educated, energized by novel connectivity, and clustered around particular demands and critiques, as follows:

* demands for dignity and democracy, for openness and opportunity, for fair and lawful treatment, for belonging and inclusion;

* critiques that their country’s systems are too much in the grip of exclusionary predatory elites who covet and loot, abuse and neglect, and who rule through excessive cronyism, corruption, and uncaring disdain.

* And the grandest themes mean these systems are now rotten and should be changed.

• And what are these systems that the protesters are assailing? Troubled varieties of the two “winningest” systems of the modern era: patrimonial corporatism and liberal democracy.

* Patrimonial corporatism: strong centralized state, ruling clique(s), huge patronage networks, large public sector, dependent private sector, often with trappings of democracy but rigged elections and constrained political parties. Think Mexico, Egypt, Japan, Greece, mostly a couple decades ago. In TIMN terms, patrimonial corporatism is strong on T+I, constrained on +M, and resistant on +N.

* Liberal democracy: limited state, countervailing powers, circulating elites, free elections, independent political parties, limited public sector, capitalist private sector, often with obscured patrimonial and corporatist aspects. Think Europe, Scandinavia, North America. In TIMN terms, liberal democracy is muted on T, strong on +I+M, and nascent on +N.

Note: This distinction is designed to move beyond the conventional one between dictatorship and democracy (or totalitarian vs. authoritarian vs. democratic), which normally treats dictatorial regimes as negative and unsuitable. In TIMN, patrimonial corporatist regimes often suit current local conditions quite well, better than would a liberal democracy. Both systems can work well for their circumstances, when properly led. (The term “patrimonial corporatism” has rarely been used before, but I think it has a lot of typological potential.)

• The protests indicate that, in the societies at stake, both systems have gone awry, become corrupt and sclerotic, and are in deep trouble, no longer properly serving much of the population.

* Where patrimonial corporatism has been the norm (e.g., Egypt), the protesters want their systems to become more like liberal democracies.

* But where liberal democracy has been the norm (e.g., the U.S.), the protests imply that this system has turned increasingly undemocratic and plutocratic — indeed, patrimonial and corporatist (as in charges of crony capitalism, regulatory capture, revolving doors, neo-feudalism, plutonomy).

• If these protests amounted to ordinary movements in ordinary times, then appropriate adjustments might work, via standard scenarios:

* Activists would ally with established organizations, like political parties and labor unions, as well as form new entities to pressure for reform.

* Cairo (not to mention other capitols where patrimonial corporatism has prevailed) would authorize significant liberal-democratic reforms.

* Washington (not to mention other capitols where liberal democracy has prevailed) would make serious efforts to reduce the patrimonialism and corporatism that now pervade it and other power centers.

* And/or measures would be taken to repress the movements, such that few reforms occur, business-as-usual endures, and co-optive adjustments are made in who gets paid to play.

* In the best such scenarios, the distortions in these triformist (TIMN's T+I+M) systems would be remedied: separations, balances, limits would be corrected for each form; “monstrous moral hybrids” (see Part IV) would be disbanded.

• However, from a TIMN perspective, these are not ordinary movements or ordinary times. The triformist (T+I+M) era is ending; the quadriformist (T+I+M+N) era is beginning.

* Triformist era: 18th-20th centuries, following spread of market (+M) form alongside earlier tribal and institutional (T+I) forms; exemplified by capitalism, liberal democracy, familiar conservative vs. liberal debates about roles of government and business, occasional upsurges of social and cultural tribalism, on both Left and Right.

* Quadriformist era: began in mid-to-late 20th century, with rise of network (+N) form of organization, whose nature and implications have barely begun to unfold, but which appears to strengthen civil society far more than state and market actors.

* The Occupy-type movements are doing more than other movements to date to express and propel the rise of the (+N) network form. They will succeed to the extent that they continue to do so.

• This theme about Occupy and similar movements elsewhere is in line with TIMN system dynamics that I’ve laid out before:

“During the rise of a new form, subversion precedes addition: When a new form arises, it has subversive effects on the old order that weaken the old forms, before it has additive effects that serve to consolidate a new order.” (source)

“New modes of conflict and cooperation emerge with each evolutionary shift: A society’s efforts to transition from one stage to the next, or relate to a society that is at a different stage, are bound to create internal and external contradictions; indeed, the values, actors, and “spaces” favored by one form tend to contradict those favored by another. Thus, the rise of a new form induces epochal philosophical, ideological, and material struggles that are jarring to a society’s stability, transformability, and sustainability. This happened in the past when tribal systems faced the rise of states, and states the rise of market systems. It will happen anew now that the network form is on the ascendance, energizing mainly nonstate actors.” (source)

I shall elaborate and clarify further in Parts II, III, and IV. Meanwhile, Parts II and III will have little to add about a key theme introduced above — patimonial corporatism — but Part IV will return to discussing it.

* * * * *

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Sidebar: Several interesting comparisons, notably here and here, show that the world-wide pro-democracy uprisings of 2011 resemble Europe’s democratic revolutions of 1848, more than other historical antecedents. The similarities include the extent of popular participation, the demand for democracy, the nature of the grievances, and the use of media. And since the 1848 protests produced mixed results all across Europe, an implication is to expect not much better outcomes this time around.

Maybe so. But I bring the comparison up for another reason:

If 2011’s wave reflects the rise of the (+N) network form, as I posit above, what about the 1848 wave? Where’s the similarity in that TIMN regard? Back then was too early for the network form of organization to be much of a cause (even though social network analysis can be applied to the 1848 wave). But — and here’s my TIMN point — it was an era when the (+M) market form was on the rise, reshaping not only economic but also political and social dynamics. Indeed, representative democracy depends on the penetration of (+M) market principles and dynamics into the (+I) realm of the state.

This is in keeping with what I’ve written before about TIMN’s system dynamics across the ages:

“As each form takes hold, energizing a distinct set of values and norms for actors operating in that form, it generates a new realm of activity — for example, the state, the market. As a new realm gains legitimacy and expands the space it occupies within a social system, it puts new limits on the scope of existing realms. At the same time, through feedback and other interactions, the rise of a new form/realm also modifies the nature of the existing ones. An example is the evolution of European absolutist regimes into liberal democratic regimes, which occurred as old hierarchical state institutions gave up on mercantilism and were remolded by the rise of the market system and the collateral spread of marketlike electoral politics. If the addition of a new form occurs properly — including through the creation of new regulatory interfaces — the older forms and their realms end up being strengthened, not weakened, even as their scope is newly limited.” (source) (earlier)

Of course, that’s rather sketchy, and I don’t know enough about the 1848 wave to be sure, but I figure the hypothesis is worth this sidebar for possible further consideration: The 1848 revolutions were “caused” by the rise of the market form, much as the 2011 revolutions are “caused” by the rise of the network form. As to whether the post-1848 outcomes imply being cautious about expecting much from the 2011 wave, I’ve little idea. But my sense of TIMN suggests that the stakes this time around involve a different kind of democracy, not just representative democracy. I’ll hope to clarify this as Parts II, III, and IV take shape.
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* * * * *

ADDENDUM: READINGS FOR PART I

A collection of quotes, gleaned from roaming around online write-ups about Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and related protests elsewhere. Inclusion does not mean approval, only that I sense a bearing on matters raised in the main text of this post. Arranged according to whether a quote speaks mainly to the causes (see Part I), conduct (see Part II), cognition (see Part III), or consequences (see Part IV) of the protests.

Causes of the protests: background critiques — A few readings show the importance of dignity. Some speak to the role of civil society. Several call for new social compacts. Most rage against capitalism. Since TIMN requires the market form to persist, I’d prefer critiques of capitalism that still praise the market form when it is applied properly. I only found a few for this set of readings.

Kurt Andersen:

“"My son set himself on fire for dignity," Mannoubia Bouazizi told me when I visited her.

“"In Tunisia," added her 16-year-old daughter Basma, "dignity is more important than bread." …

“In Sidi Bouzid and Tunis, in Alexandria and Cairo; in Arab cities and towns across the 6,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean; in Madrid and Athens and London and Tel Aviv; in Mexico and India and Chile, where citizens mobilized against crime and corruption; in New York and Moscow and dozens of other U.S. and Russian cities, the loathing and anger at governments and their cronies became uncontainable and fed on itself.

“All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.” (source)

Marlies Glasius:

“… Instead, I suggest that all the movements of 2011 have common antecedents and common ideological elements, in particular articulating a new emphasis on dignity, and a radical concept of democracy as a practice. …

"… A totally new element in the vocabulary of all the movements has been an emphasis on human dignity, which is constructed as requiring fulfillment of basic socio-economic needs, treatment with respect by authorities, and participation in determining one’s fate. The flip side of this appeal to dignity is indignation. The protests are not just against unemployment, wage cuts and other austerity measures, but also about having been lied to by politicians and about different manifestations of crony capitalism.” (source)

Marc Lynch:

“But the uprisings were not only about jobs and bread; as Sudanese intellectual Abdelwahab El-Affendi wrote in January, echoing a famous slogan of the 1950s, the revolutions were needed so that the people would deserve bread. The theme of restoring the dignity of the people pervaded the Arab uprisings. The police abuse that drove Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation and killed the young Egyptian Khaled Said struck a chord with populations who experienced daily the depredations of uncaring states. The gross corruption of Ben Ali's in-laws and Hosni Mubarak's efforts to groom his son for the presidency simply insulted many Tunisians and Egyptians -- and they were ever less afraid to say so. A fiercely independent and articulate rising generation would no longer tolerate brazen corruption, abusive police, indifferent bureaucracy, a stagnant economy, and stage-managed politics. …

"That opening was seized by an increasingly aggressive press, led by figures like the irreverent editor Ibrahim Eissa and liberal publisher Hisham Kassem, as well as determined new Internet citizen journalists. Independent newspapers such as Eissa's al-Dustour eviscerated the pretensions of their rulers. Al Jazeera talk shows threw every issue open for debate. Activists like Tunisia's Sami Ben Gharbia used Internet tools to reveal the Tunisian first lady's shopping trips to Paris on the president's private jet. Bahrainis used Google Earth to reveal the shocking size of lands expropriated by the royal family for private use. Egyptians like blogger Wael Abbas circulated videos of police abuse and identified individual officers online. This opening of closed regimes to raw information and opinion, a faith in the power of public ideas, was itself one of the key ideas underpinning the Arab uprisings.” (source)

John Robb:

“The real reason we are seeing this movement right now is because Capitalism, the last great ideological system, is in crisis. This isn't merely a crisis of outcomes (economic depression, financial panic, etc.), it's a crisis of BELIEF. While people generally believe in the idea of capitalism, a critical mass of people now think that the global capitalist system we currently have is so badly run, so corrupt, so terrible at delivering results that it needs either a) a complete overhaul or b) we need to build something new.” (source)

George Monbiot:

“The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

“Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."” (source)

David Graeber:

“It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we’re all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.” (source)

Bill Moyers:

“Those “men of action in the capitalist world” were not content with their wealth just to buy more homes, more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else. They were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else. And they succeeded beyond their expectations. After their forty-year “veritable crusade” against our institutions, laws and regulations — against the ideas, norms and beliefs that helped to create America’s iconic middle class — the Gilded Age is back with a vengeance.” (source)

New Scientist:

“As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

“The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.” (source)

Naomi Wolf:

“Suddenly, the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not identifying and organising themselves along national or religious lines, but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy. Their enemy is a global "corporatocracy" that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.” (source)

Matt Taibi:

“Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left. . . .

“We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. . . .

“But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.” (source)

Cincinnatus:

“. . . The primal social contract of western liberal democracies has been broken. Governments cannot fulfill their most elemental obligations – the provision of basic social and security services, the fair and effective organization of markets and currencies, and the long-term leadership to assure a stable future.

“Governments have failed to prevent the capture of their governing structures by the very parties they are meant to govern. Not surprisingly, democratic governments have lost the trust of their citizens, which is now manifesting itself in “Occupy” protests in more than 900 cities around the world. Protesters are no longer content to “work within the system” for change because they realize that the system itself is rigged and dysfunctional. Read between the lines, and it is easy to see that protesters are demanding a new system of governance, one that can uphold a fair and functional social contract and restore trust, the currency of legitimacy.” (source)

Slavoj Zizek:

“They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.” (source) (alternate)

Wendy Brown:

“The OWS events this fall are the twin gifts of, on the one hand, the inspirational Arab Spring and, on the other, the colossal failure of the Obama presidency to place even a light rein on neoliberal de-regulation or install a modest interval of separation between Wall Street and Washington. If the first was an obvious trigger, the second should not be minimized: Had any of the promised Obama "hope" been substantially realized—early withdrawal from Iraq war, closing Guantanamo, stimulating economic recovery with jobs creation, repealing the Bush tax cuts, tightening regulations on finance capital, expanding access to affordable higher education, reining in health care costs—many Occupy Wall Streeters, especially the young, might have remained wedded to the electoral political process that engaged them so intensely just three years ago.” (source)

McKenzie Wark:

“The ruling class in the United States is less and less one that makes things, and more and more one that owns information and collects a rent from it. Sometimes this is productive, in that it at least designs new things and creates new markets for them. Apple and Google: the commodity economy at its finest. But in other respects the ruling class becomes one that just seeks rent without really doing much to earn it.” (source)

Michael Hudson:

“… What is easiest for most people to accept is the idea of restoring the way the economy used to be more in balance – back when people earned income by being productive rather than getting rich by transferring other peoples’ savings and public giveaways into their own pockets. But what I sensed in New York was anger not only at this economic problem, but the fact that the political system is broken. There is no one to vote for as an alternative to pro-bank candidates. So what began as anger has become a gathering awareness that Mr. Obama was simply fooling voters instead of leading the change he promised. That’s what politicians do, of course. But people hoped that he might be different. That was the gullibility he played on. He has turned into the nightmare they thought they were voting against. …

“There is no way to clean up the mess that the Democratic Party has become since politics moved into Wall Street’s pockets. The Republicans also have become a party of lobbyists. So it looks like there is no solution within the existent system. This is a revolutionary, radical situation. The longer that the OWS groups can spend on diagnosing the problem and explaining how far wrong the system has gone, the longer the demonstrators can gain support by showing that they share the feelings everybody has these days – a feeling of being victimized. This is what is creating a raw material that has to potential to flower into political activism, perhaps by spring or summer next year.

“The most important message is that all this impoverishment and indebtedness is unnecessary. There is no inherent economic reason for things to be this way. It is not really the way that “markets” need to work. There are many kinds of markets, with many different sets of rules. So the important task is to explain to people how many possibilities there are to make things better. And of course, this is what frightens politicians, Wall Street lobbyists and the other members of the pro-oligarchic army of financial raiders.” (source)

Naomi Klein:

“Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.” (source)

Chris Hedges:

“Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. . . .

“. . . The liberal class, which at once was betrayed and betrayed itself, has no role left to play in the battle between us and corporate dominance. All hope lies now with those in the street.” (source)

Nicholas Kristof:

“So, yes, we face a threat to our capitalist system. But it’s not coming from half-naked anarchists manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives.

“It’s time to take the crony out of capitalism, right here at home.” (source)

Phillip Blond:

“All was well in the liberal universe, until the collapse not just of the economic compact, but of the social accord as well. After the crash and after the riots [in London], and amid the continuing, terrifying disaster of the debt crisis, the ruling liberal orthodoxy seems anything but secure. Nor should it be — the social fragmentation that has broken parts of our society and eroded much of our social compact continues apace, as does the collapse of economic growth across the western world.” (source)

Umair Haque:

“Our institutions are failing — they're failing us; failing the challenge of igniting real, lasting human prosperity. If institutions are just instruments to fulfill social contracts, then ours are shattering because the social contracts at their hearts have fractured.

“I call it a Great Splintering — not purely an economic phenomenon, as in "Great Contraction," but a social one: an era when social contracts are being torn up, abrogated, betrayed, abandoned, by accident, by design, by "regulatory capture," or simply by polities too gridlocked to progress. Broken social contracts aren't just tidy abstractions, empty of visibly real consequences, disconnected from the noise and clamor of our messy human lives. As they break, yesterday's ways of living, working, and playing rupture; yesterday's organizations, from corporations to banks to nations, creak and crack.” (source)

Paul Mason:

“19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites.

“20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual.” (source)

Alexis Madrigal:

“DELETE Strategy/Marxist ideology: Despite the dogged determination of some on the right to read any critique of capitalism as pure Marxism, this is just not the case. While some protesters may espouse the desire for massive and structural changes to our economic system, they are not calling for a Marxist revolution. As journalist Bruce Nussbaum put it, "OWS is against Crony Capitalism, not Capitalism. It's FOR Entrepreneurial Capitalism... OWS has splits. Some want a share economy. Others are nihilist. But most see Steve Jobs as a hero."” (source)

Amitai Etzioni:

“Some days one cannot but wonder whether one should join Occupy Wall Street, the tea party or both.” (source)

* * *

For additional readings, see the addendums to Part II, Part III, and Part IV [pending].

Many thanks to posts by Michel Bauwens and his P2P Foundation blog for initially pointing out many of the foregoing readings.

Many thanks to Richard O'Neill, director of the Highlands Group and Highlands Forum, for his overall interest and encouragement.

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[UPDATE — November 30, 2011: I’ve substantially edited this post since its initial posting and updating in October. The post now stands alone as Part One, and its addendum now contains only the readings that pertain mainly to this part. I have added new readings — and may yet add more. I’ve moved earlier readings that go better with Parts Two and Three.]

[UPDATE — December 6, 2011: I’ve added about a half dozen new readings to the Addendum, and entered links to Part Two.]

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Bauwens’ “partner state” (part 3 of 3) . . . vis à vis TIMN

2011-10-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

This post provides part 3 about Michel Bauwens’ concept of the “partner state.” Part 1 is here, part 2 here (eventually). All combined, they correspond to a third post in a series of similarly-titled posts about the future of the state vis à vis TIMN. The first post focused on Philip Bobbitt’s “market state,” the second on Phillip Blond’s “civic state.”

Part 1 outlined Bauwens’ partner-state concept and the broader P2P theory in which he nests it. Part 1 also described what P2P networks are like, as a form of organization, and what other major forms his vision/theory entails. Part 2 is about P2P theory’s tri-modal architecture, including its ideas about the empowerment of civil society, the rise of the commons as a new (third) sector, and P2P as a new (third) mode of governance.

I’ve scouted myriad blogs and other web sites, searching for ones that relate to my TIMN interests in the evolution and organization of societies — past, present, and future. I’ve found many interesting sites. But only one shows a strong overlap with TIMN, and it’s the blog about P2P theory and practice. That’s the main reason I’ve spent so much time and text on it.

The P2P blog’s ideological orientation is to the Left of my own. For purposes of developing TIMN, I’d like to find an additional blog (or other material) that is equivalently to the Right. But so far, I haven’t. This may reflect the fact that hardly any theorists on the Right have grasped the potential long-term significance of the network form. More on that some other time. Right now, back to P2P theory and Bauwens’ partner-state concept.

Toward a new ideological spectrum: beyond today’s Left and Right

As noted above, Bauwens’ views lean decidedly Left. Most posts at his blog, whether by him or colleagues, reflect Marxist, anarchist, socialist, or Left libertarian ideas, to varying degrees. Moreover, other blogs that affiliate with his — there is a growing community of them — are mostly on the Left. Many are interested in promoting the promise of the commons, including under the rubric of a new ism — “commonism” (yes, spelled with two ‘o’s and no ‘u’) — whose very name harks back to an earlier Leftist ideology.

Yet Bauwens is no ordinary Leftist. His P2P theory is geared to revising the Left side of the ideological spectrum. At the same time, he is looking far beyond today’s Left and Right, for he thinks that P2P dynamics will remold the entire spectrum, appealing in different ways to the Lefts and Rights of the future. He mainly aims to create alliances across the Left, based on P2P principles. But he’s also open to alliances with actors on the Right who have begun to believe in P2P principles.

For example, P2P’s concept of “cooperative individualism” — a concept that expresses a shift from competition to cooperation, as mentioned in the part-1 post — is said to reflect values from both the Left and the Right:

“[T]his turn to the collective that the emergence of peer to peer represents does not in any way present a loss of individuality, even of individualism. Rather it ‘transcends and includes’ individualism and collectivism in a new unity, which I would like to call ‘cooperative individualism’.” (source)

“Peer to peer theory . . . is in a unique position to marry the priority values of the Right, individual freedom, and the priority values of the Left, equality. In the peer to peer logic, one is the condition of the other, and cooperative individualism marries equipotentiality and freedom in a context of non-coercion.” (source)

Moreover, unlike many traditional Leftist isms, P2P theory is not necessarily anti-hierarchy or anti-market. It raises objections to statism, capitalism, and neoliberalism. But it also calls for retaining a limited state and market system, albeit constrained by civil society and the commons sector. This too, in Bauwens’ view, may provide a basis for alliances across conservative and progressive lines:

“All this means that it is hard to pin down P2P within the old categories of left and right ideologies; it is a hybrid form with market-based and commons-based aspects.” (source)

“Yes, we can build alliances around commonalities in the construction of a world centered around civil society, the commons, and peer to peer dynamics.” (source)

In particular, Bauwens approves of the Catholic distributism that appears in Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism, presuming it can be molded in P2P directions and help result in one of Bauwens’ prime objectives — “a grand alliance of the commons”:

“What then, is the position of ‘P2P’ towards the Right. I have often stated that I believe peer to peer to be a dynamic of the Left, as it seeks further emancipation, while the Right generally seeks the continuation of existing social hierarchies. . . .

“Nevertheless, we can find conservative and liberal traditions which have a place for P2P and commons-oriented dynamics, and in my view it might be possible to unite people of different political backgrounds around concrete common priorities. Take as one example, Catholic Distributism, or the stress of the Red Toryism of Phillip Blond on civil society, mutualities and cooperatives. . . . Commons can therefore be made to work, and P2P dynamics be made to expand, without requiring any adherence to political principles proposed by the Left, as the people of the Right also often have a place for community, the commons, etc. More importantly, most people are not always consistently on one side in all their convictions, but often mash-up different preferences.

“If we ever want to achieve a political and social majority for a phase transition to a commons-based society, then we will need a very broad social alliance.” (source)

Partly because of this openness toward new alliances across the ideological spectrum, Bauwens insists that P2P is “meliorist” rather than “utopian” in its political and practical implications:

“So why is the P2P approach not utopian. First of all, because we do not strive in any way for a vision of a perfect society. P2P is not about achieving a classless society say, or universal brotherhood. It’s about reversing the destruction of the biosphere by abandoning a system based on a fake notion of natural abundance, and of reversing the increasing trend of artificial scarcity that hampers human social innovation. . . . [O]ur approach is meliorist, improving where we can. Yes, we are also for a more radical change in the logic of society, around the commons as main institution and with a non-infinite-growth market as sub-system for the allocation of rival goods, but this can be achieved only by a time-dependent drive to maturity.” (source)

Yet, let there be no doubt that P2P theory implies, and Bauwens is seeking, a revolutionary transformation. P2P is meant to become “an alternative and a successor to capitalism” as well as to the welfare and market state. Unlike some past ideologies on the Left — e.g., communism and socialism — P2P would not seek to impose a classless, stateless society or a totalitarian state. In a P2P-based society, a limited state and market system would still exist. But it’s a partner state, and what remains of the market system is guided by commonism more than by residues of capitalism.

“Peer to peer is therefore not a continuation of the socialist/communist tradition, but a re-elaboration of emancipatory practice and theory under new historical and social conditions.” (source)

“Socialism has traditionally been focused on the state, and while the state has historically proven to be necessary to balance unbalanced market forces, it has not proven to be very successful as an autonomous mode of production. So any socialism that harks back to the failed statism of 20th century socialism, will also be a disaster in the waiting. P2P Theory offers a new expanded role for the state, not just as the arbiter of the market, or as paternalistic ‘welfare’ state, but as a Partner State, that directly empowers and enables civil society to be autonomously productive. This is indeed the strong claim of P2P Theory, i.e. that we now have a superior mode of commons-oriented peer production which surpasses both the statist and market modes. But peer production needs an infrastructure and support which needs to come from enlightened and democratic public authorities.” (source)

This is all interesting and pertinent to TIMN. TIMN implies, similarly, that the rise of network forms of organization — be they +N or P2P — will lead to new ideologies and philosophies across the political spectrum, as well as to a new kind of state (1996, pp. 30-33). Bauwens has identified a way this may occur on the Left, and begun to specify the content. He also senses that the Right will surely be remolded as well. And although he is sketchy about the details, he sees prospects for building conceptual bridges to next-generation conservatives. He is not seeking to foster an upheaval that would be hostile toward an information-age, P2P-oriented Right.

Yet, I’d say it’s still far from clear how the Right may be affected and evolve as it grasps the rise of the network form. Thinkers on the Right have barely begun to look ahead in network-oriented terms. Bauwens and his colleagues are heartened (as am I) that conservatives increasingly criticize capitalism’s recent contortions — e.g., “the free market all too often turns out not to be a free market at all, but a corporatist racket for the few” (source). But, from what I’ve read so far, that still leaves thinkers on the Right far from wanting to see the rise of something similar to a partner state, or a commons sector, or a P2P-based society. Indeed, Bauwens doubts that the Right, even Red Toryism, would ever accept as strong a public sphere as P2P implies, and he is wary of the Right’s continuing incapacity to move away from policies that impoverish the poor and middle classes.

Even so, whether or not new political actors emerge on the Right who make common cause with P2P values, economic actors may still appear who ally with P2P endeavors based on mutual material interests. The future of P2P may depend somewhat on ideological innovations across the political spectrum, as discussed in this sub-section. But P2P may depend even more on business innovations that motivate “netarchical capitalists” to ally with P2P commoners, as discussed in the next sub-section. At least that’s what I gather Bauwens is arguing.

Transition and transformation: a new phase of social evolution

P2P theory is ultimately a theory of social evolution that depends — much like TIMN — on the rise of network forms of organization, in relation to the full set of major forms of organization that societies use. Bauwens’ full set emphasizes hierarchies, markets, and P2P networks, with an occasional nod to tribes as the earliest form. In TIMN, the tribal form receives fully equal emphasis, along with the other TIMN forms, as a constant, enduring factor, even in today’s most advanced societies. If I’ve written this two-part post adequately, those points should be evident by now and not require further elaboration here.

Moreover, in laying out how these forms of organization have affected past social evolution, Bauwens often focuses on two past phase transitions — the first involving feudalism, the second capitalism — in order to draw lessons for theorizing about the next major phase transition: to a P2P society. But I’m not going to elaborate on his historical analysis here either. For now, I’d rather make six quick points that bear more directly on his future prognoses about the partner state.

First: Bauwens is sure that a major transition and transformation is looming and that it is important to position oneself accordingly:

“The way I see it, we are going through a major cultural, political, economic transition; nothing less than a revolution and phase transition; the P2P Foundation wants to position itself as one of the trusted players that can offer guidance and learning in this transformation, on both individual and collective levels.” (source)

“. . . At the P2P Foundation, we expect first a reformulation of capitalism, but we also expect, in about a generation, a fundamental phase transition towards a new form of society.” (source)

Second: Bauwens’ analysis, and his sense of positioning, entails a long calendar of phases that reflects his penchant for Kondratieff cycles (or waves):

“In my own writings on how and when I see the shift towards a P2P oriented society, I use a mostly historical reasoning, based on the Kondratieff cycles.

“Basically, given that 2008 is the Systemic Crisis (still unfolding through sovereign defaults), this can be given as the start of a new cycle, which, after a number of years of struggling with the previous crisis, leads to a new upcycle. I argue that this new upcycle of capitalism necessarily means a more intensive usage of the new P2P logics, and will therefore strengthen the P2P aspects of society, even as they are used/coopted by the present dominant forces in their own interest and for their own survival. This gives us roughly twenty-five–thirty years (2008 to 2033-2038) in which P2P can move from emerging social logic, to paritary [parity?] social logic, and hence, it could set the stage for a phase transition.” (source) (variant) (more)

Third: His scenarios about how this phase transition may unfold include a transgressive phase (for fielding social movements), a constructive phase (for building the commons), and then a political phase (for creating new institutions, like the partner state). More to the point, his scenarios split into a smooth “high road” and a rocky “low road” to a P2P future — with much depending on how capitalism adapts to P2P dynamics:

“Here we have to outline two possible subscenarios:

“1) the high road scenario, the development of a new globalism under peer production, preserving the best elements of industrial-capitalist civilization, and finding sustainable ways to maintain relatively high living standards;

“2) a low road scenario, in which the dislocation is of such depth, and of such duration, that the P2P phase transition can only occur in a context of intensive relocalization and breakdown of globality; . . . As a historical analogy, think the end of the Roman empire and the long time needed for the new feudal system to reach some stable point of take-off.” (source)

Fourth: While Bauwens’ theorizing about social evolution is generally quite conventional, it brings up a neat notion about phase transitions: that, across history, from ancient to modern times, when a new form of organization has arisen in the context of older, stronger forms — “embedded” amid them — it makes sense for “hybrids” to emerge during phase transitions. Such hybrids combine actors from an era’s “dominant mode” of organization with actors representing an era’s emerging mode, in ways that benefit all partners to the hybrid, but that may also help subvert the old order and generate the new one. For the looming phase transition, this crucial interim role will be played by “netarchical capitalists” — e.g., Google (?) — who are willing to work with P2P commoners. Thus, in this view, phase transitions depend not so much on struggles between elites and masses, as on innovative alliances between break-away segments from the old system and adaptive segments from the emergent one:

“The process is very similar to how slavery changed to feudalism, and feudalism to capitalism: by a mutual reconfiguration of both the elite and the producing classes. . . . [P]eer to peer develops as a germ form in the margins of the market, and is increasingly adopted, until it eventually achieves some kind of parity. At some point in time the old meta-system enters into crisis, and the already existing new subsystem becomes the new meta-system.” (source)

“Some may see that parallel movement of the netarchical fraction of capital, as a negative development, but I believe it is precisely this which guarantees the further development of peer production. Rather than the Marxist prediction of a new class taking power and creating a new mode of production ex nihilo, which has never occurred in history, I believe that phase transitions occur precisely because both the producing and managing classes, at least fractions of them, move into the same direction of a successor mode.” (source)

“The point is, while it originally appears to strengthen the capitalist totality, it at the same time creates post-capitalist logics, . . . . Commons-based peer production, the sharing platforms, and crowdsourcing are three main forms of this mutual adaptation.

“The paradox is that it both creates new forms of capitalism, and new forms of post-capitalism. It is both immanent and transcendent, and we have to resist any either/or logic but rather see them both occurring at once.” (source)

(For additional commentary about this point, see the appendix containing Bauwens’ emails in my recent post on hybrids.)

Fifth: Against this background, Bauwens’ partner state is supposed to arise and settle into place as P2P takes hold; but whether the partner state will be a permanent or transitional feature of long-range social evolution is left up in the air. The time periods that he has in mind are so long — à la Kondratieff theory — that the partner state might exist for ages. Yet, a state may also ultimately become unnecessary and “wither away,” its functions superseded by P2P forces vested in the commons sector and civil society — à la Marxist theory:

“. . . The new Partner State becomes the guarantor of the new commons-based peer production, until that time as it can hypothetically ‘whither away’ as more and more of its functions are taken over by an increasingly egalitarian and autonomous civil society. But, we are not holding our breath that this process can take place in historically close times. However, we do believe that the necessary phase-transition is merely a few decades away, as the urgency of biospheric destruction and social dislocation does not permit the long-range survival of the present destructive social arrangements.” (source)

Sixth — and lastly: Despite Bauwens’ convictions about all the above, he believes that it will be a while, and require lots of effort, before P2P theory is widely accepted. For him, “P2P is nothing else than a premise of a new type of civilization that is not exclusively geared towards the profit motive.” P2P offers a “new and intentional moral vision”; and it “holds the potential for a major breakthrough in social evolution.” But he believes its realization is not an “inevitable evolutionary logic.” Thus he figures he has a large task ahead to educate, rally, and assemble others to move in this direction:

“What I have to convince the user is that
- 1) a particular type of human relational dynamic is growing very fast across the social fields, . . .
- 2) that it has a coherent logic that cannot be fully contained within the present ‘regime’ of society.
- 3) that it is not an utopia, but, as ‘an already existing social practice’, the seed of a likely major transformation to come.” (source)

I’d say he’s doing quite well at it.

Wrap-up comments about the partner state and P2P theory

Well, that nearly does it for this effort to analyze Bauwens’ partner-state concept. I’m too out of steam to provide a summing up. My key points will have to remain scattered among the three posts for now. And I’ll end on a different note:

All this reading and writing has deepened my sense of the overlaps between TIMN and P2P theory. In a very general sense, some key similarities are:

Both emphasize the rise of new network forms of organization.
Both expect a new network-based sector to emerge from civil society.
Both involve the endurance of old forms: tribes, hierarchies, markets.
Both foresee a new kind of state.
Both imply the creation of new ideologies across the political spectrum.
Both amount to future-oriented theories of social evolution.

Yet there are also some significant differences, as follows:

P2P networks and +N networks are not identical concepts.
P2P emphasizes the commons sector; TIMN has neglected it, so far, and may imply a different kind of new sector instead.
P2P emphasizes hybrid forms of organization more than does TIMN.
P2P focuses on political economy far more than TIMN does, or will.
TIMN implies quite a different way to measure evolutionary status.

In my view, the similarities are more significant than the differences. And the differences are not irreconcilable or unmanageable. Both TIMN and P2P are works in progress, and they can learn from each other. More on that in a future post that will compare TIMN and P2P along the lines listed above, and that will raise some cautions and criticisms I’ve not mentioned yet.

Meanwhile, I keep looking for theorizing on the Right that overlaps well with TIMN. Phillip Blond’s overlaps somewhat, as discussed in a prior post. But his approach has no clear equivalent to the tribal form; and it doesn’t quite recognize the network form, despite the emphasis on expanding the roles and responsibilities of civil-society associations. So, I’ll keep an eye on his work — it’s very interesting — but it’s not quite what I’m looking for on and from the Right.

I keep noticing that Frank Fukuyama’s work has had potential to go in TIMN directions. Thus I plan to turn to it before long. In my view, his early book about “the end of history” concerns the triumph of the triformist (T+I+M) paradigm. And his latest — The Origins of Political Order — appears to offer a marvelous analysis about the evolution from tribes to institutions (T+I). However, as I recall, his book on Trust shows his thinking is not in tune with +N (or P2P) ideas about the network form. He doesn’t come around to viewing it as a new organizational form now on the rise, but mostly adopts the academic SNA (social network analysis) view of networks as a trust-based social form that lies behind all organizational forms. That’s rather unfortunate, for it means that this leading thinker on the Right has not yet grasped the full significance of the network form and isn’t ready to accept that a quadriformist (T+I+M+N) phase lies ahead, giving history a new end. Nonetheless, I hope to turn next to analyzing his writings as a view from the Right, especially since they offer so much about the T+I+M phases.

Bauwens’ “partner state” (part 2 of 3) . . . vis à vis TIMN

2011-10-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

[PLACE-HOLDER: This is a faux post. The text for this post — part 2 of a 3-part series on Bauwens’ partner-state concept — is not ready yet. I’m filing this notice as a post just to create a place-holder for it, so that, when ready, it appears in a correct sequence between parts 1 and 3.

Part 2 is going to focus on P2P’s tri-modal architecture, with sections on its views about the empowerment of civil society, the rise of the commons as a new (third) sector, and P2P as a new (third) mode of governance. When part 2 is done, I’ll insert it here and delete this place-holder.

Meanwhile, part 3 is done. Instead of continuing to let it sit, I'll post it tomorrow, in order to keep a semblance of momentum going here, despite my flagging ways these days.]

TO BE CONTINUED

Miscellany: Wondering about “hybrids” — all sorts everywhere

2011-09-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

[UPDATE — October 15, 2011: Despite my irritation at overuse of the term, here’s an innovation — the “hybrid company” — that suits TIMN. This “new type of company intended to put social goals ahead of making profits is taking root around the country, as more states adopt laws to bridge the divide between nonprofits and businesses. . . . called flexible-purpose corporations, new companies that are part social benefit and part low-profit entities.” (source)]

[UPDATE — September 7, 2011: I’ve added and/or edited a few sentences, mostly to clarify Bauwens’ view of “hybrids” at his request. A few other changes have also been inserted. If interested, see the end of the appendix for explanation.]

I never expected to turn to thinking and now posting about hybrids — hybrid governance, hybrid war, etc. But happenstance is serendipitous sometimes, and what I’ve come up with bears on both TIMN and STA matters. Besides, it looks as though hybridity is becoming a defining trait of the postmodern era. If so, all the more reason to share a few observations, as follows.

* * *

In the prior part-1 post about Michel Bauwens’ concept of the partner state, I noted that P2P theory seems to depend on “hybrids” more than does TIMN. By this, I mostly meant hybrid forms of organization, say entities that mix hierarchies and networks.

In an email (see appendix below), Michel responded with clarifications about his view. One was that, across history, from ancient through modern times, when a new form of organization has arisen in the context of older, stronger forms — “embedded” amid them — it makes sense for hybrids to emerge, especially during phase transitions. These hybrids combine actors from an era’s “dominant mode” of organization with actors representing its emerging mode, in ways that benefit the partners to the hybrid, but that may also help subvert the old order and generate the new one.

This is a sensible, sophisticated point to make about the nature and role of hybrid organizations in social evolution. I will make further reference to it in a part-2 post on his partner-state concept. I like his point; it overlaps with a parallel point I make about intermediate forms and transitional stages in the TIMN progression, without using the “hybrid” term.

But then I got to wondering about hybrids more generally, as follows.

Noticing a growing trend in “hybrids”

Hybrids are everywhere these days. With little effort, I re-found reputable write-ups about not only hybrid organizations, but also hybrid governance and hybrid government, plus hybrid regimes, hybrid systems, and hybrid societies. And then about hybrid threats, hybrid conflicts, hybrid war, and hybrid warfare, as well as hybrid enemies, hybrid adversaries, and hybrid insurgency — some of which called for a hybrid strategy. Not to mention references to hybrid technologies (hybrid cars), hybrid cuisine, hybrid music, and hybrid spaces. And with a little more effort, I suppose I’d have re-found references to hybrid cultures, hybrid religions, hybrid economies, and maybe even to hybrid ethnicities and hybrid personalities. And of course, flowers known as botanical hybrids have existed for ages — they’re an archetype of the term. Then, to cap all this, to my surprise, I happened on a new think-tank named The Hybrid Reality Institute, which does research and analysis on a Hybrid Age!

Thus, the term “hybrid” is being used extensively. Perhaps more than ever before. In all sorts of fields. And for good reasons too: These are complex and complicating times. Much is in flux, and globalization and other forces are putting once-separate matters into contact more than ever. New mixes are bound to occur.

Discerning two different types of hybrids: traditional and mutational

But as I wonder about all this variety, it appears that two different kinds of “hybrids” are in play:

Hybrids that reflect the traditional meaning of hybrid: They represent a novel combination — a mix, compound, fusion, amalgam, merger, joining, or blending — of two or more elements that already exist and have significant strength apart from each other.
Hybrids where something innovative and relatively weak is emerging alongside something established and strong: These hybrids are not the traditional type, for they represent the new trying to be born amid the old, in part by means of the new and the old becoming attached to each other. This hybrid represents a kind of incubator — a catalyst, emergent, or novity — for it renders an embryonic, symbiotic synergy that benefits (or limits?) the nascent, budding element.

These are two different types not only in design but also as to purpose. The purpose of the first is the existence of the hybrid itself, as a synthesis that stands on its own. Like a hybrid flower, or the American-style taco. But the purpose of the second is growth and transition; it’s a dialectical hybrid that stands to evolve, possibly to when the new can exist better on its own apart from the old (or alternatively, to help the old constrain the new). Like the hybrid car. And what Bauwens was talking about.

In other words, the first type of hybrid is an end in itself — a novel but static fixture. However, the second type is a means to a future end — a constantly mutating trend that augurs future transition.

Though it’s just my impression, the second seems to be proliferating the most, far more than the first. I’ve noticed this particularly in the fields of governance and conflict studies.

Assessing the postmodern significance of the mutational type

Assuming the distinction is accurate, does it matter? I’m not sure, but it seems worth pointing out, including for others to ponder as well. I’d offer a few observations regarding the second type in particular:

All these instances may well mean that the postmodern era is the era of hybrids — that hybridity is becoming a hallmark of postmodernity. In contrast, the modern era was often about keeping matters distinct and separate, in their own places and boxes, despite its emphasis on expansion, innovation, and connection. The postmodern era appears to be equally if not more about expansion, innovation, and connection, but now with an unusual new intent to break down walls, transgress boundaries, and mix identities, mechanisms, and purposes.

Yet, type-2 usage of the term “hybrid” is becoming something of a fad, reminiscent of that earlier fad (which I aided) of putting “cyber” and “network” in front of one noun after another, in enthused efforts to participate in analyzing the implications of the information age. It can be fun, and meaningful, but let’s not overdo it. Overuse tends to be numbing for any term; and “hybrid” carries an extra risk — its overuse implies that nothing is itself, by itself, anymore (which, of course, is a postmodern view). It surely would not make sense to oppose use of the term; it’s too entrenched for that by now. But I’ll hope it becomes less of a fad, and that fewer major concepts are fielded in its name.

Despite the preceding cautions and caveats, there is a good practical reason to resort to the term in some instances. It’s a neutral term, devoid of specific content. Thus its use can help build consensus and skirt disagreement around a topic whose underlying dynamics are uncertain or controversial. Thus “hybrid governance” and “hybrid war” are apt terms in these respects. Behind both lie debates about the significance of “network” and “cyber” factors. In addition, the case for “hybrid governance” reflects efforts to transcend established notions that the public and private sectors are the key modes of governance, in favor of accommodating new notions that polycentric, commons-type modes deserve consideration now too. Meanwhile, the case for “hybrid war” reflects difficulties that experts have had in analyzing the mixing-up of regular and irregular forces — tribal, criminal, terrorist, mercenary, hacker, and other irregular forces — in current conflicts. In both the governance and conflict fields, the adjective “hybrid” has served to shunt aside terms that seemed too jargony and tendentious for many experts and practitioners to coalesce around. The hybridized terms have made political sense.

But even where a “hybrid” term seems advisable for now, there's still reason to be wary in regard to type-2 applications where something radically new is emerging. If care is not taken, the term can obscure as much as it reveals; it can stifle as well as stimulate debate about underlying factors; it can make a type-2 hybrid seem like a type-1 — all to the detriment of illuminating and grasping what is newly growing within the hybrid. Neither “hybrid governance” nor “hybrid war” would have been coined, were it not for the emergence of information-age network forms of organization and related technologies. So long as the proponents of those terms keep their eyes on figuring out the new forms and their implications, matters may progress well. But if such “hybrid” terms are used to enable “business as usual” and downplay what’s new, the future will recede further from our grasp.

Preferring a cautionary conceptual posture toward the term

For all these considerations, I may cautiously increase my usage of “hybrid” a bit. But where TIMN is concerned, I will probably stick with the terms I’ve already used — “intermediate form” and “transitional stage” — to denote transitions in the TIMN progression from monoform (T-type) to quadriform (T+I+M+N) societies. Thus, in this progression, the chiefdom amounts to an intermediate form or transitional stage in the T to T+I progression; and likewise mercantilism, in the T+I to T+I+M progression. I hesitate to label chiefdoms and mercantilism as hybrids, though in a sense they are. (As for the transition to quadriform societies, Bauwens’ P2P theory suggests that “netarchical capitalism” — a new kind of P2P-related hybrid — will play key roles. I have some doubts, reserved for a future post.)

Yet, I’ll appreciate the term “hybrid” when it crops up sparingly elsewhere, and not as a fad, particularly in the fields of governance and conflict.

In regard to governance, a recent special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (July 2011) on “Patrimonial Power in the Modern World” does this quite nicely. With Max Weber’s ideal types as its departure point, this special issue is about how patrimonialism has persisted and vied with rational-legal bureaucratic forms across the ages and around the world. In TIMN terms, it’s about how the tribal (T) form — patrimonialism is tribal in nature — may relate to the institutional (+I) form, giving way to it, or subverting and constraining it. The points made in this issue — at least in the articles I read by Mounira M. Charrad and Julia Adams, Randall Collins, and Richard Lachmann — are neatly consistent with TIMN.

The Collins’ article goes (too?) far in declaring (p. 16) that “The historical shift from patrimonialism to bureaucracy is the key organizational transformation of the past thousand years.” Then, after a discussion that should be recommended reading for hybrid-war analysts, he concludes (p. 30) that “The most successful crime organizations have worked insidiously in tandem with the state, rather than challenging it to war or even to a popularity contest.” Excellent points, but no explicit mention of hybrids yet.

Then, finally, the Lachmann article makes a few explicit references to how patrimonialism “shaped the hybrid political and commercial institutions” in 17th and 18th Century Europe (p. 214), before turning to his key concern: the revival of patrimonial tendencies among America’s economic and political elites, as a 21st-Century expression of “how the dynamics of elite conflict within bureaucratic, capitalist societies can generate patrimonialism” (p. 204). In sum, sparing but meaningful mentions of hybrid forms, in a volume that bears beautifully on TIMN (and possibly P2P theory too?).

With regard to conflict, a good example is an impressive study known as The Joint Operating Environment (JOE) 2010, prepared last year by the now-disestablished U.S. Joint Forces Command. It notes the increasing use of the term “hybrid” to describe the likely complexity of the future adversary. But the document also cautions (p. 66) that, “While hybrid approaches constitute the most notable pressing challenge in the contemporary security environment, the Joint Force must anticipate the employment of yet other unique methods.” I interpret this to mean that the term “hybrid” had some limitations when it came to covering all the trends and scenarios that JFCOM thought should be of concern.

Meanwhile, I’ll now refrain from critiquing Bauwens' writings about his use of the term. He’s made his case well. And I’ve made mine, hopefully well enough for now. Enough said. [But perhaps not, given the updates I’ve added, as discussed in the appendix.]

So that this post remains like a brief miscellaneous aside, and does not grow into an essay, I end on that note. But there is surely more to be said about the matter: Do hybrids that mix compatibles differ much from ones that mix contradictions? Are social theories that decompose systems into consituent parts, multiple logics, and ideal types bound to generate hybrids, if only as analytical devices? How can societies avoid creating the “monstrous moral hybrids” that Jane Jacobs (1992) warned may occur when her “guardian” and “commercial” syndromes — TIMN’s +I and +M forms, not to mention the other two forms — are mingled improperly? Even though hybrids per se are not a dominant theme in TIMN, it affords plenty of room for asking such questions.

= = = = =

Appendix: Michel Bauwens Clarifies His Usage of “Hybrids”

What follows is text from an email by Michel Bauwens to me on July 15, 2011, explaining how and why he uses the term “hybrid” (slightly edited to correct a few typos and slips):

“As you may recall, I use Alan Page Fiske's relational typology, and a historical view that various of the four relational forms [identified by Fiske] variously dominated societies [as follows:]
- as soon as tribal bands become complex and have a surplus, they switch to a dominance of the gift economy;
- as soon as class society and the state forms, hierarchical allocation becomes dominant;
- when capitalism emerges, market pricing becomes dominant;
- when peer production emerges, a horizontalisation occurs and communal shareholding gradually becomes stronger.

“However, in none of these phases is one mode dominant, but rather there is a core mode and it influences the other modes. For example, feudal 'merit marking' or 'salvation economies' are communal shareholding, but within a system of hierarchical allocation (for example, the common property of the church exists as part of hierarchical feudal society, and feudal gifts to the church are the product of 'tribute', etc...). Similarly, today, capitalism tends to integrate other modalities into its orbit, i.e. communist family dynamics are totally integrated into capital formation.

“Furthermore, there is a long period of adaptation; as a new form, such as peer to peer emerges, it is at first embedded in the older dominant system, which it paradoxically strengthens; so the choice for coloni instead of slaves, strengthens the continuance of the Roman empire for an extra couple centuries, just as merchant capitalism strengthens the feudal order; today: emerging peer dynamics are embedded in capital formation, i.e. netarchical capital is using crowdsourcing, co-creation, co-design dynamics, for its own self-reproduction. My point is that such adaptations can only be partial and that if a new modality has a true hyperproductive potential, it will use that adaptation in reverse, i.e. to strengthen its own social reproduction, and this is crucial: both can occur at the same time, i.e. there is a struggle of mutual adaption in which both side try to incorporate the other in their own dominant logic. Thus, just as peer producing communities adapt and use private capital to achieve some form of sustainability within the current dominant system, so to the dominant organisational forms of the older system, use the emergent new modalities for their own benefit, i.e. profit maximisation. This by necessity generates lots of hybrid social formations.

“To summarize/simplify it, when the 'older', say 'vertical' formations encounter the horizontalisation of p2p, and vice versa, 'diagonalisation' occurs. This means that 'pure' p2p dynamics exist, but embedded in hybrid and complex social formations. My expectation is, of course, that as the new forms strengthen their autonomy and self-reproduction, at some point, the opposite occurs, i.e. the commodity forms start weakening, and adapt to peer to peer as the new dominant logic. This is not a linear occurrence, but a irregular dynamic where 'quantitative change' can suddenly need to a new 'qualitatively' different phase transition. The change from feudalism to capitalism is a good example. For several centuries, capitalist dynamics are integrated into to the old system, but by the 18th century, parity is achieved, then, with the American and French revolutions, true phase transitions, after which the feudal logics are part of the new dominant logic of capital.”

On September 2, 2011, a couple days after this post was initially published, Bauwens sent a new email further clarifying his view of hybrids, as follows (excerpt, slightly edited to correct a few typos and slips):

"I find your treatment of hybrids of interest, but wonder if you 'got' my central point, i.e. that there is always a mixture of modes in any type of civilisation, BUT, that they are all influenced by one particular 'chaotic atrractor' i.e. the dominant mode. For example, the family is a commons, but inserted in the reproduction of the workforce of the capitalist society; or in Cuba, there are coops, but inserted in the state form of accumulation, etc. I'm not sure that you understood this central argument that among the diversity there is one dominant logic that informs them all. The question is thus crucial, especially in phase transition, what is the domimant mode, is the commons subsumed by the logic of capital, or is the commons subverting the logic of capital and strenghtening itself?"

In reply, I noted that I understood his point, and reminded him that I never meant for this to be a post about P2P, but rather just a post that collected some side-tracked notions I'd had about hybrids in general, just to get them off my desk. Even so, I offered to add a sentence to the early paragraph summarizing his view, and to add his latest email to this appendix. He liked that offer — hence most of the edits I make as part of this September 7 update. Besides, it gave me an opportunity to insert subtitles, plus a paragraph about the JOE 2010 document.

Bauwens’ “partner state” (part 1 of 3) . . . vis à vis TIMN

2011-07-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

This is the third in this series of similarly-titled posts about the future of the state vis à vis TIMN. The first focused on Phillip Bobbitt’s concept of the “market state,” the second on Phillip Blond’s “civic state.” This one is about Michel Bauwens’ “partner state.”

The earlier posts explained why these three together (mostly alliterative happenstance) and provided background on each. The post about Blond also noted some similarities in his and Bauwens’ future prognoses. Since then, I’ve noticed additional differences regarding how Bobbitt, Blond, and Bauwens look at the state — differences that I’ve reduced to space-time-action (STA) orientations, in a nod to this blog’s other theme:

Space: In Bobbitt’s writings, perhaps because he’s a constitutional theorist, the state has majesty; it looms large — it’s a centerpiece of social evolution and high civilization. This is less true of Blond’s writings. As a conservative, he’d like to “render the central state superfluous” — though not the state en toto at all levels of society, for he still regards government as necessary. In Bauwens’ writings, presumably because he is on the Left, the state seems more like a begrudged necessity, worth having for limited purposes if it is radically reoriented and kept “modest” in scope. For him, the size of the state is less important than how it is embedded in society. In a way, that makes his perspective extra-interesting for TIMN; many theorists on the Left are so anti-hierarchy that they’d prefer to eliminate the state altogether in the future.
Time: Bobbitt is sweeping in his historical scope, starting with the 1500s and seeming to reach far into the future. However, my sense remains that his market-state notion is more about the present and near future than the long-range. In contrast, Blond recounts little deep history, but for mentions of Edmund Burke. He is preoccupied with the present and near future — yet I think his ideas apply to the longer-range future, better than Bobbitt’s. Of the three, Bauwens engages the longest time span. That reflects his partly-Marxist orientation, as well as his interests in social evolution, Kondratieff waves, and complexity theory. The longer the time perspective, the more interesting for TIMN.
Action: All three believe that people have leverage over the future. But each offers a different emphasis. Bobbitt’s is on the logic of markets, and Blond’s on the logic of civil-society associations, though both nod to other forces. For Bauwens, everything is now being permeated by the logic of networks. Of the three, only he emphasizes the rise of network forms of organization, specifically peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Lots of theorists are interested in networks nowadays; but few are also interested in how they may alter future social evolution — and Bauwens is one of the few.

I’ve intended to post about Bauwens’ concept for months. A recent post — “Blog status update” — alludes to why my posting has lapsed for so long. But there’s another reason for my delay with this particular post: When I first planned to do it, Bauwens had written little about his concept — far less than Bobbitt or Blond had written about theirs — and I expected to have a relatively easy time drafting a post. But then, in a prolific burst, Bauwens produced a string of elaborations; and the longer I languished, the larger grew my backlog of readings about P2P theory and the partner state. I’ve ended up having to read more than I did about either Bobbitt or Blond. I’m still not fully caught up, and I’m still not sure I’m quoting and citing the best sources for Bauwens’ ideas. But what I have here about P2P and the partner state — and I’ve included lots of quotes, perhaps too many — will have to do for now. I expect to draw on additional readings to have more to say about TIMN vis à vis (and versus) P2P in future posts.

* * * * *

Bauwens anticipates the “partner state”

In Bauwens’ view, what will — and should — supersede the nation-state (as well as the welfare-state and the market-state) is the “partner state.” This will — and should — occur not so much because it offers a better kind of state per se, but because, as the information age progresses, society as a whole will be transformed by the spread of P2P networks across all sectors, and by the growth of the commons as a favored sector. Indeed, his partner state requires a P2P-oriented society that has a strong commons sector.

There is a lot to describe and explain here. And it might be clearer if I were to begin by discussing P2P networks and the commons first, before getting into the nature of the partner state. Bauwens proceeds that way in his own posts at his blog. But I’m sticking to my pattern for this series of posts — sketching the nature of the state comes first.

Bauwens’ partner state is meant to be a state that enables and empowers people. It should not dominate and determine on its own. Rather, it should support and guide — provide expertise, remove obstacles, be an arbiter, act as a regulator and orchestrator — on behalf of the actors who matter most in his vision: groups and individuals who are arrayed in P2P networks and embody P2P values. Some of these actors may emerge in government and business circles that define the traditional public and private sectors. But most will arise in civil-society circles that reflect a radical expansion of a new third sector — the “commons sector” — which is expected to become as, if not more, influential than the traditional two sectors.

Here are a few statements about these points, excerpted verbatim from a few of Bauwens’ blog posts (please overlook occasional grammar issues):

“Beyond punctual adoption of pro-commons policies what we want to achieve in a next phase is a “reform” of the state, towards more of a Partner State model, whereby public authorities empower and enable the social production of value by civil society, and in this way sustains a wide variety of commons-oriented institutions and practices. . . . [W]hat we want to reach ultimately is a transformation of the state, as guarantor of a commons-based civilization. . . . [F]or a thorough commons transformation to occur, we will need fundamentally different state formations.” (source)

“[W]e need a political extension, one that, based on a commons-oriented policy framework, and a push towards replacing the corporate welfare state with a Partner State, . . . [that] institutes commonfare . . . and retakes control of the ‘commanding heights of the economy’, now in the hands of the destructive predatory factions that have taken control of the market states . . . .” (source)

“We believe that under conditions of peer production, the state form will continue to exist, because the common good cannot be solely taking care of by individuals or groups taking on contracts, nor by the invisible hand of the commons, . . . The ultimate goal is the transformation of the present state form which privileges private interests, towards a ‘partner-state form’ which works for the common good, the general interest of the commoners, and the thrivability of the commons.” (source)

“Rather than seeing itself as sovereign master, the state must be seen as embedded in relationships, and as in need of respecting these multiple relationships. . . . We can probably expect that the nation-state, along with the newly emerging sub- and supraregional structures will continue to exist, but that their policies will be set through a dialogue with stakeholders. The key will be to disembed the state from its primary reliance of the private sector, and to make it beholden to civil society, i.e. the commons, so that it can act as a center of arbitrage. . . . This is why we will say elsewhere in the text that one of the key goals of a P2P movement will be, or should be, ‘For a Commons-based Society with a reformed market and state’.” (source)

In many respects, Bauwens observes, the partner state will correspond to a kind of multi-layered and cross-linked “network state” (à la Manuel Castell’s renowned concept of the same name):

“What emerges is a new form of the state. It is a state made of shared institutions, and enacted by bargaining and interactive iteration all along the chain of decision making: national governments, co-national governments, supra-national bodies, international institutions, governments of nationalities, regional governments, local governments, and NGOs (in our conception: neo-governmental organizations). Decision-making and representation take place all along the chain, not necessarily in the hierarchical, pre-scripted order. This new state functions as a network, in which all nodes interact, and are equally necessary for the performance of the state’s functions. The state of the Information Age is a Network State.” (source)

(Note his substitution of “neo-governmental” for “non-governmental” in the standard definition of the acronym NGOs. I like that.)

Those quotes seem to represent the essence of Bauwens’ partner state. It’s a rather spare concept, in that little is said about what such a state would look like in detail — a point true for Blond’s civic-state concept as well. But no matter, the important point is that the philosophical direction is clear, as are its main organizational principles. Many states have long tried to do much that the partner state is supposed to do: enable and empower people in ways that strengthen civil society. Yet, the rise of P2P networks offers a distinctive forward-looking way to do so, one that could not have been proposed before our era. For Bauwens, how the partner state may itself be structured is less important than how it is embedded in the embrace of new P2P networks that represent civil society and especially the commons sector.

Lest Bauwens’ concept — or my sketch — seem too spare, I hasten to point out that it relates, as he occasionally notes, to concepts about “deliberative democracy” (not to mention variants like associative, collaborative, monitory, and/or participatory democracy). Liberal democracy has long emphasized indirect representation — representative democracy — by way of political parties and popular elections. Deliberative democracy is about creating more direct and immediate ways for people to shape government policies and laws. Thus, deliberative democracy would foster mechanisms like community forums to generate citizen inputs about policy and budget priorities. Bauwens foresees that organizing pro-commons civil-society actors in P2P networks around the partner state may be crucial for instituting deliberative democracy attuned to the information age.

The big picture of which the partner state is a part

Clearly, the partner state amounts to only a part, even a relatively small part, of Bauwens’ overall vision. Bobbitt’s market state and Blond’s civic state are the central features of their visions. Not so for Bauwens’ partner state. The nature of P2P society writ large is the central feature for him — the state amounts to just a layer in that vision.

It’s not entirely clear to me what all the layers are. But P2P-oriented actors representing civil society and the commons sector appear to comprise the major layers (and players). And there are also layers that allow for more traditional public- and private-sector actors. But details aside, my point is that the evolution of P2P society is envisioned in layers — sometimes onion-like with the partner state at the center, in other instances strata-like with the partner state atop. Here is one statement about this:

“The vision of P2P theory is the following:

1) the core intellectual, cultural and spiritual value will be produced through non-reciprocal peer production;

2) it is surrounded by a reformed, peer-inspired, sphere of material exchange;

3) it is globally managed by a peer-inspired and reformed state and governance system, a “partner state which enables and empowers the social production of value”.

Because of these characteristics, peer to peer can be said to be the core logic of the successor civilization, and is a answer and solution to the structural crisis of contemporary capitalism.” (source / source / variant)

What’s significant (in my view) is that Bauwens’ formulation of a future P2P society / civilization keeps the state around, playing crucial roles, although he and many of his colleagues on the Left might prefer to see states wither away eventually, with other P2P mechanisms (or layers, to stay with the metaphor) taking on their functions. Here is one statement to that effect:

“My conviction regarding the state is that:

1) It is a current inevitability.

2) In the long term, we do need an expression of general interests that is separate from a mere federation of private interests, even if these are expressed by peer governed civil society networks.

But it is important to realize that the current form of a class-based state . . . is not an eternal form of that general interest.

Our notion of the Partner State is a transitional concept, that would allow the state to evolve from its current corporate welfare orientation, to one where it both becomes an enabler and servant of civil society and its peer networks, and a[n] arbiter in charge of meta-governance between public, private and common/civil functions.

What I’m predicting is that 1) many new functions will progressively replace state functions as they are made progressively redundant; and 2) that for the remaining functions, the very nature of the state as an oppressive entity will change.

. . . As [Paul Hartzog] writes, in what could be an alternative definition of the Partner State concept: “it may be that for the state to continue to participate effectively it would have to overcome its own nature, or state-ness, and in so doing would no longer be a state in any real sense.”” (source; punctuation and paragraphing slightly edited by Ronfeldt)

And, according to Bauwens, this new society and its state should evolve in phases, over a period of many decades, first by attracting political and other actors who come to see its value, then via new social movements that favor the growth of the commons sector, and finally by generating enough reforms to institute the partner state. Here is one statement about this:

“I see different steps of political maturation of this new sphere of peer power. First, attempts to create networks of sympathetic politicians and policy-makers; then, new types of social and political movements that take up the Commons as their central political issue, and aim for reforms that favour the autonomy of civil society; finally, a transformation of the state towards what I call a Partner State which coincides with a fundamental re-orientation of the political economy and civilization. You will notice that this pretty much coincides with the presumed phases of emergence, parity and phase transition.” (source / source)

In other words, P2P theory is a grand (but not grandiose) theory of social evolution that has visionary implications. But before turning to that, I find that there is much else yet to lay out.

P2P as the transforming form

Bauwens’ concept of the partner state extends from his focus on the rise of “P2P networks.” By this, he means organizational networks that tend to be all-channel (or full-mesh), where everybody is or can be easily connected to everybody else, as an equal. By design and intent, P2P networks are open and inclusive toward all comers who aim to contribute as peers. Indeed, P2P is quite similar to the +N form in the TIMN framework (though, in my view, not all +N networks and actors have to be P2P).

Thus, P2P networks lack deliberate hierarchy and are decentralized. But more than that, they are distributed — broad distribution is a hallmark. In Bauwens’ view, P2P relations occur best (and perhaps only) in distributed networks. And he contrasts them to centralized (hierarchical / single-hub) and decentralized (heterarchical / multi-hub) networks, which tend to have leaders and hubs that may constrain members. Politically, he equates hierarchy with absolute monarchy, heterarchy with a separation of powers, and distributed networks with a bottom-up, nearly leaderless, even hubless mode of governance. As his colleague David de Ugarte writes, “We are in the process of going from a world of decentralised networks to a world of distributed networks.” (source)

In other words, P2P is akin to “panarchy” — a concept championed by his colleague Paul Hartzog (who is also John Arquilla’s and my source for the concept in our writings). As Bauwens has noted, quoting an unspecified writing by Hartzog,

“The tagline on http://panarchy.com is “many.2.many :: peer.2.peer :: d.i.y” precisely because it takes all three of these conditions for an effective panarchy . . . . No one of them is sufficient.

“D.I.Y.” [do-it-yourself] is necessary but not sufficient. “Many to many” is necessary because communication has to be happening so that individual parts are connecting, disconnecting, and reconnecting in a myriad of new ways all of the time, and “peer to peer” is necessary because that communication has to be happening in a non-hierarchical way in order to actively work against the systemic bias that is the natural consequence of power-based social systems. Communication is only possible between equals.” (source)

In still other words, P2P tends to be “stigmergic” — a concept favored by another of Bauwens’ colleagues, Kevin Carson (not to mention John Robb). What this means is that P2P leads to problem-solving outcomes by enabling multiple individuals to make constant, interactive, iterated inputs to address a task, progressively adjusting the whole until all converge on agreement. Thus, P2P networks are meant to be self-organizing and self-adjusting; they fuse both individualism and collectivism, both competition and cooperation, in ways that were not feasible, nor much valued, until now.

Bauwens has also said that “P2P projects are characterized by holoptism.” This means that participants can access all information about other participants’ activities and thereby see the whole at any time — it’s a kind of distributed topsight. Holoptism thus contrasts with the hierarchical concept of panoptism. In sum, dynamics like panarchy, stigmergy, and holoptism all help make P2P quite different from how hierarchies and markets normally operate to reach decisions.

For Bauwens, then, P2P spells a metaphysical as well as organizational shift. It enables “cooperative individualism” and promises an egalitarian revolution of “equipotentiality” in which “people self-allocate to tasks” and accomplish “permissionless self-aggregation” without having to risk being filtered-out or out-ranked. Thus, P2P would supplant the capitalist “division of labor” with an information-age “distribution of labor” that aims for “value creation” by people who contribute voluntarily as peers in order to develop the commons:

“Peer to peer occurs whenever we can self-aggregate and produce value without permission or dependence on obligatory hubs.” (source)

“P2P follows the adage: each contributes according to his capacities and willingness, and each takes according to his needs.” (source)

“The individual who joins a P2P project, puts his being, unadulterated, in the service of the construction of a common resource.” (source)

Bauwens’ favorite examples of P2P’s emergence include the early open-source efforts at file-sharing (e.g., Napster) and software development (e.g., GNU/Linux), for they spelled the nascence of a digital knowledge commons. But that’s only the beginning in his view. He foresees that P2P will reshape all realms of political, economic, social, and cultural endeavor, from local to global levels.

P2P networks vis à vis other forms of organization

P2P theory is based on the rising importance of information-age kinds of networks. Yet, P2P also recognizes the importance of two other forms that have dominated social evolution for ages: hierarchies and markets. Indeed, P2P theory, rather like TIMN, is full of discussions about the evolving roles of all three forms — hierarchies, markets, and networks — and the interplay among their respective realms, entities, and actors.

Of the four TIMN forms, tribes figure the least in P2P theory. It recognizes their early roles in social evolution, as well as some modern manifestations (e.g., online tribes). Moreover, two P2P values — communal shareholding and egalitarian participation — are drawn from ancient tribal dynamics. And one of Bauwens’ favorite new ideas for future transnational enterprises —“phyles” — blends clan and network design elements. Nonetheless, unlike TIMN, P2P hasn’t given tribes the distinction and weight that it gives the other three forms. In spots, P2P even seems more like a hybrid of TIMN’s tribes and networks.

Which leads to another point: P2P theory often refers to hybrids; they occur quite often, and involve all the TIMN types of forms. Thus, Bauwens recalls the tribal form when he defines “P2P as communal shareholding based on participation in a common resource.” He regards the hierarchical form as a “natural and flexible” positive for P2P projects “where everyone finds his place according to demonstrated potential” — for indeed, he adds, “Peer to peer is not anti-hierarchy or even anti-authority, but it is against fixed hierarchies and ‘authoritarianism’.” Finally, the market form enters when P2P is viewed as “a hybrid form with market-based and commons-based aspects.” (source)

I think that Bauwens is correct in making points about hybrids. They are for real (and I’ve often written about hybrids myself). But they appear to play larger, more important roles in P2P theory than in TIMN. A positive I see is that, in identifying hybrids, P2P at least preserves ways and places for the classic forms to persist. This may help counter traditional antipathies on the Left to hierarchies and markets, and Leftist hopes that P2P networks could sweep them aside. But a negative I see is that hybrids are so important in P2P theory that they start to dominate the overall picture. Of course, in P2P theory, P2P networks are themselves supposed to become dominant. But that requirement, which is different from TIMN’s requirement that no single form dominate as societies advance, may be what inherently requires P2P to give greater importance to hybrids, including for defining the nature of the partner state.

In short, P2P has many overlaps with TIMN in organizational terms. That’s why I am attracted to examining P2P, and why I may do a detailed analysis comparing TIMN and P2P in a later post. For now, however, in order to keep this post focused on the partner-state concept, only a few observations seem pertinent to offer, as follows:

In P2P theory, P2P networks are not only the transforming form, but also the form that is expected to become dominant in the future. P2P networks will — and should — penetrate and alter all sectors and activities. States (i.e., hierarchies) and markets will still exist, but they will be so transformed that only vestiges remain of their original bureaucratic and capitalist tendencies. Indeed, the partner state will take shape as an expression of the P2P form, not the hierarchical institutional form. The partner state may initially emerge as a hybrid of the hierarchical and network forms, but P2P dynamics are supposed to eventually override if not supplant the hierarchical dynamics that ruled the bureaucratic nation-state. The little hierarchy that endures will be made more transparent, voluntary, and benevolent; and the exercise of power will become much more about responsibility than control.

This is similar to but not exactly like what TIMN augurs for the state and society. Yes, TIMN, much like P2P, is motivated by the rise of the network form, and expects it to alter all sectors and activities. But while TIMN, much like P2P, expects the network form to generate a new sector (see the next section), TIMN does not imply that the +N form will become the dominant form across almost all of society. States will continue to be more about the hierarchical than any other form, no matter how modified states become. In my view, TIMN is concerned about developing but also balancing and limiting the roles of all four forms, keeping their domains relatively separate despite their influences on and interactions with each other. TIMN expects hybrids to occur in all sectors, but not to the degree that appears in write-ups about P2P theory and its implications for politics, economics, and social relations.

None of this is to say that TIMN or P2P is right and the other wrong about the future of the state. I view both theoretical frameworks as still evolving, far from finished. I’m just trying to convey an understanding of P2P, while also analyzing it from a TIMN perspective. Bauwens’ partner-state concept is consistent in many ways with TIMN (though I think my somewhat-similar nexus-state concept will prove more likely, despite criticisms). Bauwens’ concept is, in my view, on the right track.

Moreover, as I noted in the post about Blond’s concept of the civic state, part of what seems interesting for both P2P and TIMN is that Blond (on the Right), Bauwens (on the Left), and I (in the Middle?) all end up in roughly similar places with parallel views about the future, despite our differing interpretations:

We all recognize that the state will remain a crucial institution.
We all sense that state and society should be less market-oriented.
We all hope to strengthen the roles of community and civil society.
We all propose new organizational approaches that reflect network notions — Bauwens and I far more explicitly than Blond.

These overlaps, and that last point in particular, serve my search for ways to foresee whether and how a +N sector may materialize — a key reason for my being interested in their future notions about the state and society.

Against this general background, I turn next to focus on several interesting and important aspects of the partner-state concept . . .

* * * * *

Well, not yet. This write-up is already far longer and more repetitive than I wanted, and I figure I still have a long way to go. So, partly for the sake of recovering a sense of momentum at this blog, I’m breaking it into ~~two~~ three parts, and posting what’s above right now as part 1 of 2 3.

The second and third parts, which may end up equally long, will address the following topics, probably under the following tentative section titles:

Empowerment of civil society
Rise of the commons as a new (third) sector
P2P as a new (third) mode of governance
Toward a new political spectrum: beyond today’s Right and Left
Transition and transformation: a new phase of social evolution
Wrap-up comments about the partner state and P2P theory

[Note: I thank Michel for perusing the pre-final draft of this post, and letting me know he likes it. He offered comments about my points about the roles of hybrids in P2P theory. But they are not crucial to this post and may fit better in a discussion about social evolution in part 2, so I’m going to save them for part 2.]

[Update — July 26, 2011: Little edits made, adding links to posts elsewhere by Kevin Carson and John Robb.]

[EDITED — October 18, 2001: I’ve edited the closing remarks to reflect that I’ve broken the material on Bauwens’ concept into three parts — three separate posts — not two as initially stated.]

TO BE CONTINUED

Blog status update

2011-06-28T13:11:00.000-07:00

I see this blog, which I’ve rarely visited for months, still has some readers. That’s good to see. Unfortunately — and with apologies to interested parties who’ve expected posts I promised long ago — I’ve been off-track and low-on-steam for quite a while. But I’ve not lost any interest in TIMN or STA, and I intend to resume my efforts here before long.

My backlog of intentions still includes: a post on Michel Bauwens’ concept of the “partner state” (soon?), a post comparing my TIMN and his P2P views (later), and a post about future implications of TIMN for political philosophy and ideology — not to mention lots of other matters. I also intend to reiterate some TIMN- and STA-related notions I’ve left at other sites these past months: e.g., on complexity vs. complicatedness in analyzing why societies collapse (contra Tainter); on analyzing networks as a general vs. specific form of organization (lately, à la Mueller); on dignity and democracy as motivations behind the Arab Spring; on the difficulty of reforming regimes that institute monstrous hybrids (term from Jacobs); and on trends in Mexico and Cuba.

In addition, I really should get around to reading and reviewing a string of books — e.g., by Tilly, Martin, Fukuyama — that bear on TIMN. I also wish to get to writings that bear on STA in general, and the mindsets of jihadis and millenarians in particular. But that may be too much to expect right now.

In any case, the purpose of this post is not to lay out an agenda but just to signal that this blog remains active and still has potential.

* * *

I see that during my absence the blog’s formatting has gone a bit awry. In particular, some font sizes and styles have changed. I’ll try to correct that — I've already fixed one thing — so as to make posts more readable, but some technicalities may elude me at this point.

Also, as noted at the end of my last post last year, the blog became a target of spam comments and spurious backlinks. I altered the settings to disallow backlinks, hide past ones, and require comment moderation. I’m keeping those settings in place, though I like receiving pertinent comments and links.

Finally, I see that a re-feed of most (all?) my past posts spewed forth a few weeks ago, without any prompting by me. This may indicate something else is technically amiss. But perhaps it is just an episodic peculiarity of Google’s blogspot domain, since I also received re-feeds of past posts from several other blogs I follow at about the same time — all of them from blogspot.com urls.

Onward.

Scenarios for the “Afghanistan 2050" roundtable at Chicagoboyz blog: tribes versus networks

2010-09-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, this blog and I are still active, trying to get back on track, after our potential lapsed for months due to my slowing down awhile. My interim apologies to individuals whom I’d told to expect a new post on one topic or another. I still plan to do those posts, as my reading and writing get back up to speed.

Meanwhile, an invitation came my way — thanks to Mark Safranski and Michael Lotus — to join in an online roundtable about “Afghanistan 2050” at the Chicagoboyz blog. The instructions said to suppose we are in the year 2050, looking back, and submit a paragraph for a future history that would purport to analyze outcomes and consequences.

I treated this as an opportunity to disseminate points relating to TIMN. This post gathers my three posts there into one. Readers who want to see what other contributors posted should visit the Chicagoboyz archive for “Afghanistan 2050” here.

* * *

Feeling restricted by the one-paragraph instruction, and not having correctly read or remembered that we could add explanatory material if we so desired, I jammed my TIMN points into the following jargony scenario, posted on August 13:

Afghanistan 2050: Tribes vs. Networks

Here’s my one-paragraph contribution to your roundtable speculations about the view from 2050, as requested [split into six for easier reading here].
“Because of the way U.S. forces pulled back in the Teens and wars ensued in the 20s and 30s, debates continue as to whether we won or lost over there. Yet, what matters more for this quadriform theory of social evolution is the following:

The persistent grip of the tribal form of organization — and thus local resistance to allowing the institutional (statist) and market forms to take hold properly — explains what unfolded in the region and why so little could be changed. At least we finally stemmed the jihadis efforts to spread their monoform religious tribalism elsewhere.

But we’ve done less well at our deeper challenge here at home and abroad: adapting to the wrenching rise of the newest of the four forms — the information-age network form. Though we are decades into it, our leaders are still so prone to emphasizing established state and market factors — a legacy of our society’s triformist phases — that they still haven’t allowed the new form to express its key strength: letting a commons-based “social sector” emerge, so that we develop a truly quadriform society.

Yes, it’s happening in fits and starts, and we got past the debasing of our polity by revanchist retro-tribal movements on our Right and Left. Yet, it’s disheartening that America’s efforts to use the network form in combination with the other three forms has led not so much to a revitalization of our democratic and entrepreneurial potentials, as to the consolidation of a hyper-surveilling cybercratic security state.

This has kept our homeland guardedly open and safe since our pull-backs decades ago — a valid strategic trade-off, since neither Mahdista Momentum nor Xyber-Op LiberTAZ infiltrated to damage more in the 30s and 40s than Al Qaeda used to. But this twist in America’s evolution has knotted-up our ability to compete and cooperate with partners near and far.

Indeed, China’s hybrid triform system is now in a stronger strategic position than any of the world’s few national efforts to create quadriform systems that function powerfully. Even so, time is on evolution’s side; it’s normal for the rise of a major new form of organization to take several generations to mature.”
[Purportedly based on “Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks: A Theory of Social Evolution — Past, Present, and Future” (rev. ed., 2050).]

Since my post was admittedly tendentious, I directed readers to visit here for clarification about TIMN.

* * *

I thought that would be my sole contribution. But a follow-up scenario occurred to me a week later. And since Chicagoboyz once held an online roundtable on John Boyd, I mixed in a few terms that were meant to reflect Boyd and his thinking, though more as a tease than a sign of expertise on my part.

Afghanistan 2050: Tribes vs. Networks, cont.

Here’s an epilogue/postscript to my initial (August 13) post for this roundtable [now split into separate paragraphs]:
The dozen BOIDS — small ultra-quiet stealthy long-range aerial DIY drones designed to swarm against an adversary’s OODA loops — idled in range of the target, undetected, waiting for a signal that the first stone was being cast. Ten of the drones were piloted remotely by individuals who had paid large sums to train and participate in what they were about to do: stone the stoners. The other two were for tactical topsight and command (TTC, the new C4ISR) and were operated by a unit of HubrisNemesis, the secretive ethicalist netfirm whose lineage included Sea Shepherd.* This unit and a few of the attack pilots were aboard a ship in the Indian Ocean; most of the pilots were in other locations, even at home in North America, Europe, and South Asia.

While each had his/her own motivation for joining in, they all shared disgust and despair at how, once again, a great religion was being subjected to a vain tribalism. Public stoning rarely occurred anymore, and international efforts had been made for months to halt this instance. But dark local forces had prevailed, and the stoning was supposed to proceed a few minutes from now in the sun-baked arena — with no outside media or foreign observers present.

HubrisNemesis and the BOIDistas hoped that Operation StoneCold would save the condemned trio’s life. But even if that proved a false hope, at least their operation would generate video for global viewing of the ugly event’s proponents being routed as the BOIDS “stoned” them from above for the next hour or so. But unlike the people at the event, the BOIDistas would not launch real stones aimed to maim and kill; no, their weaponry was mainly metaphorical, even nonviolent, but still powerful enough to frighten and disperse a crowd — e.g., plastic meshes filled with choice liquids, gases, and powders. And if the surprise attack could be sustained long enough, nearby police and military would show up and cancel the event. And then the ripple effects would start to unfold. . . .
* See here for a fine post about Sea Shepherd and its implications [by Peter Hodge, “‘Whale war’ — a new form of conflict?” at his blog The Strategist on 07/01/10].

In my post I forgot to mention that the BOIDS might also emit sonics that could startle, stun, and scatter the unknowing. For example — and as an entertaining enlightening aside — I’d recommend the wailing howls from the 1994 Ferrari Formula 1 racecar, the 412T1, with its 3.5 liter V12 engine at song. It’s audible at YouTube in a brief clip here, and a longer one here. This, the most magnificent song ever from a racecar, is surely the sound of angels raising hell in order to raze it.

* * *

Again I thought I was done. But then it occurred to me that I might use a new post to broach an idea I had several years ago but have hesitated to write up:

Afghanistan 2050: Tribes vs. Networks, cont. & cont.

Here is another speculative scenario for the Afghanistan 2050 roundtable. It reflects themes in my August 13 post and is not inconsistent with my August 22 post:
The Black-Flag Wars of the 20s and 30s were so fraught with religious strife and devastation that by the 40s many people in the region were ready for new ways to look at the world. That’s one reason why the New Theory of Prophecy (NTP) and the movement that formed around it, the New Word Network (NWN), suddenly spread faster there than anywhere before.

NTP rested on a reaction in the Teens that too many people from too many religions, mostly in the Middle East, were claiming to act in God’s name, as His chosen people. NTP reaffirmed that Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammad were God’s prophets. What it rethought was why they all appeared in the Middle East, when God could have placed them anywhere in the world.

NTP hypothesized that if God had sent a prophet elsewhere, his Word might not have spread into the Middle East in due time, because its peoples were so extraordinarily tribal. Yet, this area was a crucial crossroads of world civilizations. Wiser, then, to put a prophet there, and have the Word spread out to the rest of the world. But with the first prophet, only his own tribe got the Word; it didn’t spread beyond them. With the second, the Word spread far outside, but not much more within the Middle East. With the third, the Word spread across the Middle East and farther around the world. But then, once again, too many people turned to claim they’d been chosen by this version of the Word and its prophet; they reverted to being extremely tribal, in ways that disparaged not only other peoples but even the first two prophets.

Against this background, NTP counseled all believers against taking God’s name in vain and claiming to be His singularly chosen people, while NWN developed a noöpolitik* strategy to ameliorate the tribalization of religion. To its credit, NWN helped undermine the appeal of Al Qaeda’s narrative in North America and Europe, and motivate the accords between Israel and Palestine in the Teens. But for the next two decades, conditions in South Asia fell prey to the millenarian Black Flag Momentum (BFM) and its belief that a new prophet was imminent.

BFM’s leaders disdained NWN and twisted the NTP to claim it meant a new prophet was bound to arise, this time for them. They’ve been wrong, and done wrong, for a quarter century — like past millenarian movements that provoked apocalyptic violence and always ended up losing. Now, conditions are finally too disastrous for even BFM and its allies to rationalize. NWN is fast gaining adherents in the region, helping people recover and reorganize. Rumors are still circulating about an imminent new prophet, but lately of one quite unlike what BFM and others had predicted — and that too is calming the region.

[Excerpt from Dawgo Skatts, “Chronicles of the New Word Network,” draft (last revised 02/30/50). Accepted for inclusion in NoöSpherica Quarterly (probably the Spring 2050 special issue on trends in religion). Still being edited for sensitivity.]
* For clarification of this information-strategy concept, see here.

That last link goes to David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, “The promise of noöpolitik,” First Monday, vol. 12, no. 8 (August 2007). For a fuller statement, see the original RAND monograph (1999).

A commenter raised a concern that “chosen people” usually refers to Jews. I tried to clarify the thinking behind my scenario as follows:

“Interesting point about the term ‘chosen people.’ As a sort of lapsed Protestant, and not well-read on religion, I’ve lost a sense it is so strongly associated with Judaism. I have long regarded it as a term that may crop up in many religious contexts. Quickly checking, I see Wikipedia has an entry for the term that emphasizes your point, yet adds examples from other religions, including ones I didn’t know about. When I first came up with the idea, I was mostly reacting to the beliefs and behaviors of Islamist terrorists, as well as sectarian and cult leaders of other faiths. Perhaps substituting another term — select? anointed? ordained? special? sent? commanded? — would be advisable.

By the way, the scenario is not meant to imply that any notion of feeling chosen is bad. To give a literary example, consider differences between Don Quixote and Captain Ahab: Both believe they are on a special spiritual mission; but only the latter is seized with rallying his crew to wreak vengeance in a vainglorious streak of extreme tribalism. In a sense, my scenario implies that the Don Quixotes prevail over the Captain Ahabs of the world.”

* * *

That’s all for now. If there are additional developments, say from a wrap-up discussion about the entire roundtable, I’ll update here.

UPDATE — September 16, 2010: The “Afghanistan 2050” roundtable at Chicagoboyz came to an end on 9/11 with a summary wrap-up post by the main organizer, Lexington Green. In addition to highlighting selected posts (including my own, I was pleased to see), he explained that

“I initiated this effort because I wanted to think-through the current effort in Afghanistan and I was spinning my wheels. I was seeing all kinds of immediately relevant granularity and not much big-picture thinking. For example, within days of announcing it Gen. McChrystal resigned, an event that dominated the headlines for a few days, but is unlikely to even be a footnote in four decades. For me, personally, the RT [roundtable] was a success. I enjoyed the posts, all of which were good, and some of which were excellent. I believe the whole is superior to the sum of its parts. The RT has given me a better idea of the big picture, and I see that others are thinking along similar lines. I hope the rest of our participants and readers also found it valuable or interesting.

“I printed out the RT posts with comments, and re-read the whole thing. It was 107 pages, the scale of a moderately sized book. We had 24 posts by 20 contributors.”

Not bad. In addition, an excerpt led off a “Recommended Reading” post by Mark Zafranski at his Zenpundit blog.

If there is additional discussion, it will probably occur at those two blogs. I do not cotton to the conservative libertarianism that permeates them — I’m becoming too much of a quadriformist for that — but they remain among my favorites for diverse, lively, future-oriented discussions about national security trends.

- - -

Note: Ever since posting about PhilipBlond’s ideas two posts back, this blog — and that post above all — has become a target of spam comments and spurious backlinks, mostly in Chinese, perhaps because the spammers are on automatic search for words like his last name. So, for the time being, I’ve altered the blog’s settings to disallow backlinks, hide past ones, and require comment moderation.

Blond’s “civic state” . . . vis à vis TIMN

2010-06-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

[UPDATE — December 24, 2001: ResPublica’s new publication — ResPublica A-Z: Celebrating two years of ResPublica — is well worth a read. It barely mentions Blond’s concept of the “civic state” — the focus of this post — but it shows that his think-tank remains intent on developing a new conservative ideology that combines principles from, yet goes beyond, today’s Right and Left. Thus the document advocates “an associative society” for the common good that is strong on “reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity” as well as civic responsibility and public accountability. ResPublica’s economic ideas remain pro-market, opposed to unrestricted or uncompetitive capitalism, in favor of a “social economy” and “moralized market” — indeed, a “participative economy where assets are distributed to the many and not hoarded by the few.” Sounds good to me.]

[UPDATE — October 15, 2011: Add Phillip Blond’s latest article to the ones I discuss below. Those earlier ones were upbeat about the prospects for Red Toryism. But this latest reflects deep pessimism about the new government.

“The “big society” was the Tories’ chance to remake a broken society and economy. The opportunity was missed. Now, unless Cameron tackles the excesses of those at the top, he will be betraying those at the bottom. . . . That we are governed by compromise, oscillation and U-turn is not merely a fact of coalition politics. At a deeper level, it is an expression of what Gramsci would have called "hegemonic crisis", in which reality is no longer captured by conventional ideas and orthodox policies.” (source)

Blond also laments that Red Toryism had been “reduced to a caricature of volunteering and philanthropy” when it’s really about “new associative models that blend private and public capital in social enterprises” to the benefit of people at local levels.]

As previously noted, while looking at Bobbitt’s “market state” concept, I also happened to look at Phillip Blond’s “civic state” and Michel Bauwens’ “partner state” concepts. A prior post focused on Bobbitt. This one is on Blond. I’d meant for it to be about Bauwens as well, but it’s become so long that I’ll spread the posts out. (I initially figured on covering all three in a single post — woeful me, with apologies to any readers.)

Why group these three — now two

Why these three in serial posts? Bobbitt, because it was time I read-up on his work. Blond, because he announces his vision by rejecting the market state depicted by Bobbitt. Bauwens, because he not only criticizes the market state but also nods at Blond’s ideas, while aiming to peer beyond and apart from them.

Yet, while Blond’s and Bauwens’ points intersect in their criticisms of the Bobbittian market state, I’m fitting their writings side-by-side for other reasons as well.

One is ideological: they are coming from and going in different directions — Blond to the Right, Bauwens to the Left. And what makes this interesting for TIMN is that they end up in roughly similar places with rather parallel views about the future:

Both recognize that the state will remain a crucial institution.
Both want state and society to become less market-oriented.
Both aim to revitalize the roles of community and civil society.
Both propose new organizational approaches to civic association that reflect +N — Blond for public services, Bauwens for the commons.

That last point is crucial. Their ideas about the future of the state pertain to the +I component of TIMN. But they also engage new ideas for civil-society associations. That serves my search for how a network (+N) sector may materialize — a primary reason for discussing them here.

Indeed, Blond and Bauwens seem headed in quadriformist directions — ecumenical, neo-limitarian ones at that, which suits my TIMN preferences. They want to break away from aging triformist models, and see possibilities for doing so. Thus both are evolutionary optimists, to a degree — and I like that, for it tracks with TIMN’s long-term outlook.

In contrast, collapsitarians and dystopians across the ideological spectrum argue that many states and other big hierarchies are goners, markets have become too ruinous, and thus the future belongs to whoever can best cluster together around tribal and network modalities. I want to dig into these pessimistic views from a TIMN perspective sometime too, but for now that’s a secondary interest.

So far, I’ve looked mainly for ideas about the future of the state that come from scholarly circles. Blond and Bauwens do not lack academic or other credentials, but their orientations are far more philosophical and ideological, deliberately political, even theological and spiritual, than I normally see in searching for future speculations that bear on TIMN. This too makes them interesting to review together, as a change of pace.

Each in his own way, Blond and Bauwens seek to surmount old distinctions about state vs. market, public vs. private, and Left vs. Right. Their views are not exactly representative of new philosophizing about the state on the Right or the Left, but I sense that they are indicative. (And if anyone has other writers to suggest, please do so in a comment or an email.)

Increasing relevance of Blond’s and Bauwens’ writings

Blond and Bauwens are not as prominent as Bobbitt. His books, despite criticisms, still have currency all these years later. Yet, the ideas that Blond and Bauwens represent have gained currency, this past year in particular, though neither has the name-recognition that Bobbitt has achieved.

Blond’s Red-Tory ideas have lately attained a bit of notoriety in Britain (and the United States). And their influence may grow now that his Conservative Party has won office and the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, has vowed to promote “big society, small government” ideas that are Blondian. But even if Blond’s efforts prove a passing flash, they still cast a revealing light for TIMN.

Bauwens’ writings are less well-known, except in activist circles interested in trends in peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. But in those circles — which, like Bauwens himself, identify mainly with the Left, often reside more in Europe and Asia than America, and operate through the blogosphere more than formal print — his work keeps gaining audience. And his focus is on what I view as cutting edge ideas and possibilities — the rise of P2P networks, the growth of the commons. (Besides, Bauwens likes TIMN.)

Caution about source materials

In reviewing Bobbitt’s analyses, I had lots of writings to go on, even without perusing his book. That’s not the case with Blond and Bauwens.

For Blond, I rely on a handful of recent articles and speeches, other material at his ResPublica website, plus commentary by a few other analysts and reviewers. Blond has just published a new book — Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It (2010) — but I’ve not seen it, and I’ll just have to presume it reflects the writings I have seen.

For Bauwens, I have much less to go on. He does prolific posting at his P2P Foundation blog. But little is about the partner-state concept , and what there is amounts more to preliminary than final thinking. I supplement it with related postings by some of his associates and other analysts, but this additional material is sparser and less diverse than for Bobbitt or Blond.

Blond looks ahead to the “civic state”

In 2009, Phillip Blond declared that an “epoch-changing moment” had arrived for British politics and the nature of the state:

“1979 brought an end to the welfare state, 2009 will see an end to the market state and the next election will, with the election of a conservative government, usher in the birth of the civic state.” (source)

And what Blond has in mind for the civic state involves a radical reform of Britain’s economy and society as well:

“There are three dimensions to this new order: a civil state, a moralised market and an associative society.” (source)

Blond’s concept appeals for several TIMN reasons. It purports to supersede both the welfare state and the market state in the near future. It aims to make conservatism progressive, by moving away from libertarianism toward communitarianism (i.e., more T, less M). It calls for a better balance among state, market, and civil-society actors — balance being a crucial criterion for TIMN. And while the details of Blond’s layout aren’t quite +N, his emphasis on invigorating old and new kinds of community associations has a +N quality (though he doesn’t speak of the network form per se, at least not in what I’ve read).

-- Vigorous critique of Britain’s past and present condition

I’m interested mainly in how Blond views the future, not the past and the present. So I’ll note only briefly his critique of Britain’s current situation: Accordingly, the welfare state and the market state have both had awful effects. They’ve led to excessive statism and individualism, to corrosive public monopolies and private cartels, and to the undermining of community associations that represent civil society. Liberalism has been the cause of this, far more than conservatism.

To impart a sense of Blond’s style and substance, here are some choice quotes, one or two apiece from the five article-length writings I’ve read, on which this post is based.

From his article on “The Rise of the Red Tories” (2009):

“[T]his crisis is more than an ordinary recession. It represents a disintegration of the idea of the “market state” and makes obsolete the political consensus of the last 30 years.”

“Look at the society we have become: we are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry. The intermediary structures of a civilised life have been eliminated, and with them the Burkean ideal of a civic, religious, political or social middle, as the state and the market accrue power at the expense of ordinary people.”

From his article on “The Civil State” (2009):

“Yet we also know what is wrong with the market state — too often it replaces a public monopoly with a private cartel. In the name of breaking up the state too little attempt was applied to breaking up the market. . . . Market fundamentalism abandoned the fundamentals of markets.”

“Only markets located in and shaped by a moral architecture are sustainable, as Adam Smith understood.”

From his speech on “The Future of Conservatism”(2009/2010):

“[W]hat the working class thought would save and secure became something that gradually and over time eventually helped to destroy them. Why? Because the state, instead of supporting society, abolished it. The welfare state nationalised society because it replaced mutual communities with passive fragmented individuals whose most sustaining relationship was not with his or her neighbour or his or her community but with a distant and determining centre.”

From his article on “The Shattered Society” (2010):

“The loss of our culture is best understood as the disappearance of civil society. Only two powers remain: the state and the market. We no longer have, in any effective independent way, local government, churches, trade unions, cooperative societies, or civic organizations that operate on the basis of more than single issues.”

“Collectivism and individualism are but two sides of the same devalued and degraded currency. And this has been the history of recent modernity — an oscillation between the state and the individual that gradually erodes civil association, which is in reality the only check on the extremes of either. . . . Contemporary libertarian individualism and statist collectivism created each other and are locked in a fatal embrace that destroys the civic middle and the life and economy of the associative citizen.”

From his report on “The Ownership State” (2010):

“Market versus statist thinking is a crude false dichotomy, based on an ideologically gloomy vision of human nature which has led both sectors into today’s cul-de-sac — a nightmare treadmill where every problem thrown up by a dysfunctional system can only be addressed by prescribing larger doses of the treatment that got us into the mess in the ﬁrst place.”

In my view of TIMN, this amounts to a salient diagnosis. For it detects imbalances among state, market, and civil-society forces, and seeks to restore a sense of limits and to correct the interplay among the TIMN forms.

Yet, I’m wary of Blond’s wily penchant to blame liberalism for all the ills he detects — e.g., when he claims that “A vision of the good life cannot come from liberal principles. Unlimited liberalism produces atomised relativism and state absolutism.” (source) In his view, absolute personal liberty requires an almighty state to police society and protect individual rights, in efforts that end up favoring the rich and harming the poor. But I leave to others the challenge of reiterating (e.g., here) or refuting (e.g., here and here) this part of his diagnosis. I’d rather focus on his future vision.

-- Promising (but sketchy) vision of the civic state

As to what’s next, Blond is quite sketchy about the civic state. But it’s clear he means a decentralized, distributist state of limited scope. Indeed, he also calls it the civil state, the associative state, the mutualized state, and the ownership state.

According to Blond, the civic state will restore people’s participation in “the common good” by re-enabling “the associative drive” that liberalism stifled. Thus it will be a state that “privileges the associative above the alienated, the responsible over the self-serving and . . . the communal over the individual.” It will express a “radical communitarian civic conservatism” — his “red Toryism” concept — that can “inveigh with equal vigour against public monopolies of state and giant cartels of the market”.

This is not just high-sounding rhetoric, for he makes clear the direction he wants the state to go in:

“In the political realm, we have to admit that democracy doesn’t work particularly well, mainly because it’s hugely centralized and substantially captured by vested interests. We need to turn it upside-down — a doctrine of radical democratic subsidiarity that would allow local associations both to select and vote for their own candidates. We can’t do that in the current political settlement. It’s too locked; there are too many vested interests. But if, like budgetary capture, we had a democratic capture, we could send democracy back to the streets. If we could ally that political economy with actual democracy, we could really have bottom-up associations and render the central state increasingly superfluous.” (source; my italics)

“The new civil state would restore what the welfare state has destroyed — human association. This new civil state will turn itself over to its citizens; it will foster the power of association and allow its citizens to take it over rather as it had originally taken over them. . . . So conceived the monolithic state could gradually be broken down into an associative state where citizens took over and ran their own services . . . .” (source; my italics)

Thus, Blond proposes that the “public sector should be broken up — not privatized out” — and many of its services transferred to civil-society actors apart from the existing public and private sectors. That appears to be his main point about the civic state; it is mainly "a facilitator” in this associative scheme. The state is still a parliamentary democracy atop a party system; but its bureaucracy is smaller, and its orientation to the economy and civil society has been redefined and restructured.

He links this to ideas for a “re-moralized market” — a “whole new model of social capitalism” based on a “civic economy” — that would benefit small and medium businesses and be less fraught by government bureaucracies and corporate cartels. However, I’m going to skip over that, and head into what’s far more significant for my sense of TIMN: Blond’s proposals for new kinds of civil-society associations.

-- Inspired ideas for civil-society association

Blond’s vision is about creating the civic state. But to make that feasible, his vision is even more about re-energizing civil society — so much so that local civil associations get to assume functions long performed by the state:

“Finally, the real recovery has to come in civil society itself. Society should be what rules, what regulates, what is sovereign. Both the state and the market must be subservient to renewed civil association. This requires a restoration of social conservatism that recognizes the claim of the common good over the free agency of the individual. “

“This is the essence of the Western liberal tradition: the rise of association — a state that isn’t dictated by the oligopolies of the market and the central government. The task of a radical conservative politics is to recover this: the middle life of civil society. Villages should run villages, cities cities, and neighborhoods their own streets and parks.” (source)

Blond’s intellectual anchor for thinking this way is Edmund Burke’s notion of “the little platoon” — in TIMN, a proto-tribal/clan (T) formation:

“It was Edmund Burke who famously spoke of conservative radicalism being founded on the little platoons of family and civic association. “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” This is the true spirit of [David] Cameroonian conservatism and, taken seriously, it represents a break with the monopoly logic of the market state.” (source)

In Blond’s view, fostering such “little platoons” will transcend the unhealthy oscillation between individualism and collectivism:

“Association is outside both state and market, and yet it makes the proper functioning of both possible. Association expresses both individuality and community. Association marks the politics of the future: it is the way we will deliver our state, and it is the way we will free our market.” (source)

The proving ground for this part of Blond’s vision is a new way to provide public services, as spelled out in The Ownership State (2010). Here are choice passages from that document:

“A new approach is needed. This report argues that real improvement depends on harnessing two powerful forces: the insight and dedication of frontline workers, and the engagement and involvement of citizens and communities.”

“We propose a new model of public sector delivery, in which services are provided by social enterprises led by frontline workers and owned by them and the communities they serve.”

“This power would allow the formation, under specific conditions, of new employee and community-owned ‘civil companies’ that would deliver the services previously monopolised by the state. Central to this power would be the obligation to ensure that full budgetary delegation of all the supporting services goes along with new responsibility. The new civil company would be structured as a social enterprise, with the scope and flexibility to allow a number of different governance structures in the light of local conditions. Such structures include community interest companies with an asset lock that prevents external transfer of the resources of the new organisation, or alternatively a similar level of social reassurance could be provided by a partnership trust along the lines of the John Lewis model.”

“Governed neither by the public state or the private market, this new civil association would localise responsibility, direct agency and promote ethos. It would do this by spreading the ownership of publicly funded provision, revolutionising public service delivery for the benefit of all.”

“What is needed is a system that will give the public, as individuals and as client groups, a literal stake in their service providers. The state must enable new associations of service-users, community members, voluntary contributors and existing social organisations to take ownership of their services, as partners with direct inﬂuence over providers.”

“That means producing something that can work on the small scale so that its universal applicability delivers gains to the widest possible magnitude. Our aspiration should be ‘mass micro’ — innovation that when repeated across the public sector can yield a macro-gain.”

That’s quite an agenda. It envisages the rise of a “social economy” based on a “new localism”. And it’s loaded with lingo about public service businesses, social businesses, social enterprises, civil companies, and civic companies. I’m not exactly sure what such terms mean, but the aim is clear: a bottom-up system for “citizen groups to take over government budgets and run them for themselves” (source). Blond favors worker buy-outs, employee-owned coops, and local investment trusts, where employees and other locals get to share in ownership, and profit is not the key purpose. His emphasis is on the delivery of public services, but he also proposes reforms to banking. It’s all very much about mutualism and distributism, in conservative senses.

What Blond lays out is consistent with what I think TIMN may imply for the future: a more delimited but also stronger kind of state (a “nexus state”), along with the rise of a new networked social sector. What’s missing from Blond’s vision is a connection to the network (+N) form. The Ownership State (2010) mentions that the “baseline requirements” for his proposals include “open systems” in which “hierarchies give way to networks” (p. 11). It also recommends “a flatter management structure in the public sector” . . . “where peer-to-peer motivation builds ethos and expertise and replaces vertical sanction” (p. 34). But so far these points are made only in passing; they deserve elaboration.

(Sidenote: Blond is not the only British leader thinking in new ways about civil society. Similar ideas appear in the Carnegie-sponsored Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society (2010) and related documents.)

A few critical reviews that try to raise doubts

I’ve looked for reviews, pro and con, of Blond’s writings, and as could be expected, the reviews are quite diverse. Many are preoccupied with where to fit him in the ideological spectrum. A common criticism is that he offers little more than a rehash of old conservative ideas — a nostalgic “Arcadian” dream about reviving small-town and village life, as laid out decades ago by G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and their Catholic Distributist League. And Blond’s “Red Tory” moniker has even prompted a counter from the moderate Left: “Blue Socialism” — meaning “socialism with a Burkean tinge” (source).

Okay. But what about Blond’s proposals for the future? In this regard, I’m struck by three criticisms, all presumably leftist, that pertain to TIMN.

The first, from Jonathan Raban’s disparaging review of Blond’s new book, is that his proposals mean dumping public services on the emerging social or third sector, to no avail:

“Stripped of its obscurantist rhetoric and foggy sermonising, Red Tory issues a moral licence to government to free itself from the expensive business of dispensing social services and to dump them on the ‘third sector’ of charities, voluntary organisations, non-profits and the like.” (source)

That might have been partly true in the past, but not necessarily the future. If TIMN is on the right track, the third/social sector is where many services will end up, for the better. Raban hasn’t grasped the potential significance of the rise of the network form for this.

The second, from a critic in P2P circles, claims that Blond’s conservatism cannot be peer-to-peer. Accordingly, his notion of community remains quite hierarchical and vertical, and the kind of state that would unfold under his vision could end up being “neototalitarian”. (source)

I’m not sure what that means, or how far to go in questioning it. But for now, I’d note that, in order for TIMN to hold up, all major political ideologies, including conservatism, will adapt to network forms and learn to use them, including P2P varieties. Surely conservatism cannot be defined a priori as being anti-P2P.

A third criticism that piqued my attention, this one from a different critic in P2P circles, is that the market would creep back into the civic associations via privatization (source).

That too is an interesting point. And it may be a risk for a while — but only until the network form gains enough strength to overcome the gravitational pull of established states-and-markets forces.

Interim wrap-up comment apropos TIMN

This post was once supposed to be about five pages long, not the wearying fifteen it’s become. So I’m ending by just quoting a passage from when I first began to speculate about TIMN (1996, p. 31):

“In the looming age of networks — assuming civil society is strengthened as the framework forecasts, or that a new network-based realm emerges from it — a new model of the state will emerge that may be relatively leaner, yet draws new strength from enhanced abilities to act in concert with civil-society actors. . . . It is not clear what actors may comprise a network-based sector or realm, but the TIMN framework implies that many will be non-profit, socially-minded NGOs. As noted earlier, some activities currently associated with the public or private sectors are already being redesigned into multiorganizational networks — notably in the areas of health, education, and welfare — and these seem likely candidates to migrate into the new realm.”

That passage reveals why Blond’s ideas immediately struck a chord — and Bauwens’ ideas too. Blond’s proposals for a civic state and an associational sector move a long way in the TIMN directions implied by that quote, even though he does not (yet?) relate matters much to the rise of the network form.

TO BE CONTINUED

Smoke and mirrors in mindfields along the U.S.-Mexico border

2010-05-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

This post means veering onto a side-track. But the news out of Arizona, riled-up reactions here in California, and talks I heard broadcast from a conference on U.S-Mexico relations at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington prompt me to trot out an old bit of analysis and try it out again:

* * *

Try to figure out who is complaining about what here: “There are too many of them. They are taking jobs and opportunities away from us. They are distorting our economy, straining our infrastructure. They remit most of their earnings back to their own homeland, instead of keeping money here. They live in enclaves. We should not have to depend on them. We can do it by ourselves.”

“They” are Mexican immigrants, right? Nope; not exactly.

Try again, after hearing more complaints: “Their influx is tantamount to an invasion. It violates our sovereignty, jeopardizes our security. It’s bad for our national dignity and identity. It contaminates our culture. It breeds corruption even crime. It limits our independence and autonomy. We’ve lost control of our borders. There ought to be a law.”

What can it be, if not Mexican immigration?

Actually, it’s how U.S. investors and marketers were viewed in Mexico not long ago, especially during the mid 20th century. Curiously, the criticisms Americans still have about Mexican immigration are virtually identical — in point by point parallels — to the criticisms that Mexicans used to have about American corporate investment in Mexico.

Positive views exist as well, often backed by research. Accordingly, U.S. investment — or Mexican immigration — has created new jobs, businesses, and markets, to the benefit of both nations’ economies. It’s been a necessary factor of production. The receiving country’s economy would suffer setbacks without it, as would the sending country’s.

But whenever a xenophobic kind of nationalism — a demonizing, polarizing kind of tribalism — takes hold, it becomes difficult to claim that the benefits exceed the costs in either issue area, in either country, even though professional research shows otherwise. Mexican criticisms of U.S. investment were often heated in the 1970s-1980s, before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994. American criticisms of Mexican immigration are newly aflame today, notably in Arizona.

In brief, a reverse mirroring has often cut across nationalist mindsets in the two countries. Many Americans have thought that Mexican immigration is mostly bad for the United States, but U.S. investment is surely good for Mexico. Many Mexicans have thought the reverse: U.S. investment has bad effects in Mexico, but Mexican immigration mostly benefits the United States. What a twist.

It is understandable that large stocks and flows of any kind from any nation make people uneasy, leading to nationalistic reactions. This is so whether the issues involve poor Mexican workers or rich American corporations — or, as in Canada, intellectual properties like American films and TV shows.

It is also true that comparing mindsets this way cannot, by itself, lead to specific measures for resolving problems in an issue area. But a good look at this reverse mirroring does imply some principles:

First, acknowledge the twist in logics: If we are so sure of our complaints about Mexican immigration, then shouldn’t we see some truth in Mexican complaints about American investment?

Develop a mutual logic: The two flows may be equally good or bad for both countries. As our socio-economic interconnections deepen, harmonized views will be needed about both (all?) kinds of stocks and flows, in both Mexico and the United States.

Try to be guided by a strategic moral precept: Don’t do to Mexican immigrants here what you wouldn’t want Mexico to do to American investors and marketers there. And vice-versa for Mexico. In other words, be neighborly, not narcissistic — behave in terms of “Do unto others . . .” instead of “Mirror, mirror on the wall . . .”

With this in mind, and taking cues from past experiences — like the 1986 U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and Mexico’s analogous 1973 Law to Promote Mexican Investment and Regulate Foreign Investment (LIME) — a few simple policy principles seem to make sense because they suit both issue areas:

Emphasize regulation over restriction. Focus on legalization, not criminalization. Prioritize the kinds of immigrants (or investors) that are best for one’s country; limit other kinds. Do improve licensing, increase inspections, sanction violators, combat smuggling, and tighten border controls. But don’t provoke labor (or capital) flight.

Develop “guest” programs. We’ve done that before with Mexican workers. Mexico has had an equivalent in the system of U.S. and other foreign-owned assembly plants (maquiladoras) along its border with our country. A by-gone Mexican law allowing U.S investment if it had Mexican partners who owned 51% treated the 49% U.S. portion as a kind of houseguest.

Avoid unilateral moves that incite a backlash from the other side. For immigration, this means no mass deportations, economic boycotts, or border-long walls. In this vein, it is also wrong for Mexican workers up here to tout Mexican flags at public demonstrations, presuming they would not want to see U.S. businessmen brandishing American flags in Mexico.

Aren’t these the kinds of pragmatic measures that a bilateral logic implies (trilateral, if Canada is included)? Wouldn’t mutual thinking like this be preferable to unilateralism?

I’d still like to think so. But conditions have changed since I tried suggesting this conceptual optic for strategizing many years ago (see sources below).

One change is that the two issue areas don’t actively mirror each other as they used to. U.S. investment is no longer a hot-button issue in Mexico. Mexicans have accommodated to it; the stocks and flows aren’t thought to be growing at alarming, disproportionate rates anymore. Not so, Mexican immigration up here; it remains a polarizing hot-button issue, especially since our nation’s economic downturn has aroused a nativist populism.

Another change is that security concerns now trump socio-economic issues more than ever. Drugs flowing North and weapons South have become the new “mirrors” — Americans fret about the former but not the latter, and vice-versa for Mexicans. Meanwhile, high levels of crime, corruption, and violence in Mexico — indeed, on both sides of the border — make it difficult to presume getting far with an optic like I’ve proposed above.

Nonetheless, some variant of my optic may yet come back into play. U.S.-Mexico relations are in need of a “reset” (Jorge Castañeda’s term) across a broad range of issues. Better yet might be a “strategic partnership” that fosters “North American competitivenes” — to use terms I keep hearing more often. (I even have a name to suggest that should resonate on both sides of the border: Plan Dos Aguilas / “The Two Eagles Plan”.) Adjusting our mirrors could play a useful role in helping us see ahead more clearly in these directions, together.

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Sources:

Mexican Immigration, U.S. Investment, and U.S.-Mexican Relations (1990)

U.S. Immigration Policy and Global Interdependence (1982)

Also see my previous blogposts on Mexico (e.g., here).

Bobbitt’s “market state” . . . vis à vis TIMN

2010-04-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

By happenstance, while working on Part 3 of TIMN’s implications for political philosophy and ideology, I’ve finally looked into Phillip Bobbitt’s concept of the “market state” and started reading about Phillip Blond’s concept of the “civic state” and Michel Bauwens’s concept of the “partner state”. I see they all relate to TIMN, meriting some separate discussion.

This post focuses on Bobbitt’s concept. And it’s become too long to add anything else. I intend to deal with the other concepts in a future post.

Bobbitt’s “market state” is appealing because it appears to slide into place in the TIMN progression, as a +M concept about what arises, evolution-wise, between the institutional state — the classic T+I nation-state — and what may lie ahead: a +N network state (or as I call it, the nexus state). The market state appears to fill a gap in thinking about how to conceptualize the evolution of the state in TIMN. Indeed, Bobbitt’s term is quite TIMNish in tone; alternative terms (see below) don’t fit as well. But to work with TIMN, Bobbitt’s concept needs considerable redefinition and adjustment.

An interesting (but tentative) finding is that Bobbitt’s “market state” is better viewed as the “late market state” arising a century or so after the “early market state” — an overwrought exaltation of the +M form in its late stages of maturity, on the eve of the rise of the network (+N) form.

What I’ve heard about and looked at

Bobbitt’s tome, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (2002), traces the historical evolution of the state in terms of five models — from “princely state” to “kingly state” to “territorial state” to “state-nation” up to the modern “nation state” — in order to identify the “market state” as the currently emerging and likely future paragon. And the analysis does so by emphasizing: first, the role of epochal wars in determining what model of state — what “constitutional order” — arises next; and second, the role of peace conferences in confirming that a system of such states spreads and gains sway. It’s a neat framework, easily displayed in nifty charts.

While I’ve still not read the book — a liability for this post? — over the years I’ve seen many references to its themes and been told they’re similar to my TIMN themes and to John Arquilla’s and my themes about information-age conflict. But I procrastinated about reading the book. Now, prompted by a recent summary and review by Clay Spinuzzi at his blog, I’ve turned to take a closer look by reading selectively: brief excerpts from the Foreword and several follow-up essays Bobbitt has posted online at his website; extra snippets I located online; a few book reviews Bobbitt lists (notably, Dennis Patterson’s “The New Leviathan,” and David Runciman’s “The Garden, the Park and the Meadow”); a long overview by Jay Ogilvy, “Notes on The Shield of Achilles,” that consists mostly of quotes from the book; and a few old blog posts about the book (e.g., by Thomas Barnett, John Robb, Mark Zafranski).

That’ll have to suffice for this post. And I sit braced to be told that I missed something significant Bobbitt said, including in a subsequent book I’ve not read but for an excerpt — his Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (2008) — where he expands on his notion of the market state.

Questionable definition and timeline of the market state

My concern is Bobbitt’s “market state” concept, starting with its definition and timeline. (Note: Unless otherwise indicated, the quotations and page references from Bobbitt’s book are probably from Ogilvy’s document.)

I have yet to spot a full, single definition of the market state. But to judge from scattered elements, it is about states becoming shaped more by global market forces — by globalization — than by national forces of all kinds. It is also about governments redesigning themselves to rely on market-oriented measures: e.g., decentralization, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing, subcontracting. Moreover, Bobbitt claims that “the market state exists to maximize the opportunities enjoyed by all members of society” ( p. 229). It is “above all, a mechanism for enhancing opportunity, for creating something — possibilities — commensurate with our imagination” (p. 232). That purpose, in Bobbitt’s view, is its hallmark, making the market state philosophically and strategically distinct from earlier varieties of the state.

As to timeline, Bobbitt treats the market state as something quite new. He dates its appearance from 1989, and foresees that the “transition to the market-state is bound to last over a long period” (p. 233). At present, “the market-state has not fully emerged or been fully realized and accepted by any society” (p. 335). Indeed, he reiterates in an interview, “We are only just a few of years down the road to what will be a many decades long process, but you can already see signs of this happening.”

Yet, what seems mostly new to me in all of this is Bobbitt’s novel name for the phenomenon. In substance, it is not much different from what Richard Rosecrance earlier termed the “trading state” (1986) and the “virtual state” (1999). More to the point, I’d say, its emergence began in the early 1970s when “transnational interdependence” began to gain notice in writings about the rise of multinational corporations and other nonstate actors, the fusing of domestic and international matters, the globalization of commerce and communications, and hence the growth of new constraints on the traditions of sovereignty and territoriality. (See writings by a host of theorists back then, notably Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, and James Rosenau).

Thus, it is inaccurate for Bobbitt to go on to argue, as he does in his next book, that developments like these “are outside the frame of reference of the popular theories of international relations that circulated at the end of the 20th century” (pp. 30-31). Many of the trends he emphasizes had been noticed for decades and took hold during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton presidencies in the 1980s-1990s. Even the individualist, opportunity-maximizing goal that Bobbitt stresses reflects the libertarianism that has coursed so strongly the past decade or two. And it is not at all clear that other market states elsewhere will be so libertarian — possibly quite the contrary.

In other words, insofar as the United States is concerned, Bobbitt’s concept is far more a reflection of the present than a portent of the future, and it’s been developing decades longer than his analysis conveys. It may be true that the nature of the market state is still unfolding in the United States, and that it has barely taken hold elsewhere around the world. But it may also turn out that the recent U.S. version proves more an exception than a rule, more ephemeral than enduring.

Thus, my TIMN angle is that, much as I’m impressed by Bobbitt’s coinage of “market state” as a term, it may turn out to say more about the American present than the world’s future, and it began to emerge decades earlier than he argues. The term does illuminate the exalted (overweening?) influence that global market forces exert over states these days. It also reflects the rising importance of outsourcing, subcontracting, and other market-oriented measures — sometimes called “government by market” (or acidly, “market-mimicking governance”) — as options for government policies and programs. That is useful and revelatory; it means the concept helps focus people’s perceptions on how powerful and pervasive market forces have become. But are we thereby opening our eyes to the beginning or the end of a long trend?

Let’s recall that the +M form began to spread centuries ago, and that its principles long ago filtered into and altered the nature of states, enabling the rise of increasingly open competitive political systems. That helps account for Europe’s evolution from the absolutist state to the liberal democratic (or parliamentary) state — in other words, from a state devoted to hierarchical (+I) doctrines, to a state whose electoral, party, and other structures also rested in part on market-like (+M) political principles.

From a TIMN perspective, then, the market state actually has a long history. It overlaps with the nation state and does not represent a departure from it as Bobbitt claims. Indeed, the world’s major liberal democracies —nation states all — have amounted to early market states for over a century. What Bobbitt has illuminated is the late market state — its overwrought aging, not its youthful rise.

If Bobbitt’s “market state” is better viewed as the “late market state” arising a century or so after the “early market state,” then its rise is occurring on the eve of the next major form: the network (+N). And that suggests a new proposition about TIMN dynamics. I’m not sure, but perhaps absolutism in the Middle Ages may be viewed not only as a pinnacle of the +I hierarchical form, but also as its overwrought exaltation, again on the eve of the rise of a next major form: in that era, the market (+M). Perhaps — and here’s the proposition (phrasing tentative) — the late aging of one form may interact with the germinal stirrings of the next in a way that leads existing regimes to overemphasize the aging form, partly to defend against the rise of the germinal form that those regimes are just beginning to detect.

Indeed, the details of Bobbitt’s analysis — the trends he stresses, the terms he uses — are often as much or more about the +N form than the +M form. He has confounded and conflated the market (+M) form with what is really new and next: the rise of the network (+N) form. A system of late market states is emerging, but so too are the outlines of what will in time supersede the market state: something akin to a network (or nexus) state.

That Bobbitt conflates the market and network forms is particularly evident in his analysis of al Qaeda. I turn to that near the end of this post. But first I have some other points lined up.

Varieties of market states — spectrum needs broadening

In Blond’s analysis, the nation state came in three varieties that contested for dominance across most of the 20th Century: communism, fascism, and parliamentarianism (or parliamentary democracy) — and parliamentarianism triumphed. Likewise, he claims, the rise of the market state will induce a new contest — even wars — among its own three varieties: the mercantile state, the entrepreneurial state, and the managerial state:

“The fundamental choice for every market-state is whether to be (1) a mercantile state, i.e., one that endeavors to improve its relative position vis-à-vis all other states by competitive means, or (2) an entrepreneurial state, one that attempts to improve its absolute position while mitigating the competitive values of the market through cooperative means, or (3) a managerial market-state, one that tries to maximize its position both absolutely and relatively by regional, formal means (trading blocs, etc.).” (p. 283)

Metaphorically, Bobbitt likens living in a system of entrepreneurial states (like the U.S., or China) to The Meadow, managerial states (like the E.U.) to The Park, and mercantile states (like Japan) to The Garden (pp. 721 ff.).

Of the three, he favors the spread of the entrepreneurial version. And he recognizes that nonstate actors may play decisive roles in determining which model prevails — even as he also doubts that business leaders will play their role properly in fostering the entrepreneurial model, the one they should like the best:

“I speculate that leadership for this move is likelier to come from the leaders of multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) than from leaders of the national security apparatus and the political establishment, but I concede that business leaders are generally not prepared for such a role today.” (p. 337)

Intriguing points. And I like his recognition of the increasing influence of NGOs and other nonstate actors. Yet, this is a rather benign threesome — too much so. In contrast, his prior threesome consisted of two totalitarian systems (communism and fascism) and one democratic system (parliamentarianism). From a TIMN perspective, those three reflected conflicting views about +M. Communism rejected +M, fascism accepted but suborned it, and democracy embraced it. And democracy’s +M qualities were what enabled it to defeat the other two.

In the future, all market states will be +M to one degree or another; and many may be kinds of democracies that correspond to Meadows, Parks, and Gardens. This should make for a better world. But let’s not discount dark possibilities that some market states may turn out to be so corporatist, controlling, stratified, greedy, and oppressive that they are more like Wilds, Wastelands, Jungles, or Hot Houses. Communism is surely defunct, but fascism — as in “friendly fascism” and “soft fascism” — still has potential. And a kind of quasi-totalitarian “surveillance state” may develop at the core of one or another market state. Not all — perhaps very few — market states will aim to enhance people’s possibilities as Bobbitt proposes. Some may resemble a “spectator state” more than a “participatory state” (to bandy about some other trendy terms).

In other words, from a TIMN perspective, the range of likely varieties is broader than Bobbitt’s threesome; it should be expanded to include more totalitarian as well as more democratic varieties. Furthermore, if liberal democracy’s +M factor explains why it won in the last epoch, and if the contests next time are going to be between late market states, TIMN suggests that the winners next time may be those states that have best figured out the network (+N) form — a form that Bobbitt’s account does not distinguish.

Many good points about state and society

The preceding criticisms aside, Bobbitt makes a lot of good points about the future of state and society. The following two quotations encapsulate them:

“The shift to the market-state does not mean that states simply fade away, however. If the acquisition of more territory is less important than before to garnering wealth, the luring of people and capital by the most attractive state policies is absolutely crucial. . . . The real shift is simply from public purposes to private purposes, from a state that takes its legitimacy by assuring the common welfare to one that instead relies on providing the broadest possible opportunity for the satisfaction of individual interests.” (p. 470)

“The market-state will live within three paradoxes: (1) it will require more centralized authority for government but all governments will be weaker; (2) there will be more public participation in government, but it will count for less, and thus the role of the citizen qua citizen will greatly diminish and the role of the citizen as spectator will increase; (3) the welfare state will have greatly retrenched, but infrastructure security, epidemiological surveillance, and environmental protection . . . will be promoted by the State as never before.” (p. 234)

In other words, the state will endure. It will even be stronger and more central in some respects, though weaker (or less controlling) in others. It will continue to depend on hierarchy. And it will deploy high-tech surveillance and security systems to keep watch. But it will also involve the formation of ad-hoc multi-agency and public-private teams to address many issues, and lead to a shift in emphasis from public to private purposes and instruments. Nonstate actors of all sorts will play increasingly influential roles, including to provide public goods. Meanwhile, states and societies will be challenged to cope with vast increases in global flows of all kinds.

My quibbles aside, I like such points. I make similar ones in a paper about cyberocracy. They’re often made by other theorists and futurists too. And such points help counter views that claim the state is a goner in the future; and they do so by clarifying ways in which the nature of the state will be altered. Also, while I initially had the impression that Bobbitt’s analysis was so focused on the state that it neglected the rising importance of nonstate actors, in fact he gives it good recognition, especially in follow-up writings. Thus, Bobbitt’s points are not all that new or innovative, but they track with and reinforce what I’ve come to regard as cutting-edge thinking about the future of the state.

Particularly pleasing and interesting is Bobbitt’s recognition of the market state’s inherent weakness. As Spinuzzi's review noticed better than others, Bobbitt does not purely advocate the development of the market state, for he cautions that:

“Whatever choice we make, we will have to find a way to compensate for the market-state’s inherent weaknesses — its lack of community, its extreme meritocracy, its essential materialism and indifference to heroism, spirituality, and tradition.” (p. 289)

He reiterates this concern during a speech where he talks about the three varieties of market states, noting that they all have a common downside:

“But I think they all have this in common for us today, that we need to develop those values and institutions that the market state does not develop: those of collaboration, of decency, of deference, of the protection of cultural communities. These are things that the market state just sweeps aside, and one of the points about drawing attention to the market state is not to become its advocate.”

This way, he begins to sound like a communitarian criticizing the libertarianism of recent decades. But he doesn’t move far in this direction. While he cautions against negative aspects of the market state, he still regards it as a mostly done deal. In it, people should expect lives rife with competition and conflict; they will have to choose and learn collaboration, if that’s what they prefer.

Yet, Bobbitt also detects that the capacity for collaboration — in particular, the development of collective goods — is crucial for states to perform well against their state and nonstate adversaries in the new epoch of conflict:

“Or can we learn to produce collective goods — like shared intelligence and shared surveillance information from shared nanosensors and shared missile and cyber defenses? Indeed, the production and distribution of collective goods — such as the coalition against international terrorism itself — may be the only way for the market-state to forestall peer competition and defeat international terrorism at the same time.” (p. 821)

A very good point. But from a TIMN perspective, it should be made into a point that is more about the network than the market form.

Flawed analysis of Al Qaeda as a virtual market state

Finally, my concerns extend to Bobbitt’s efforts to validate his market-state concept by claiming that today’s key adversary, the jihadi terrorist network associated with al Qaeda, resembles a virtual kind of market state.

Bobbitt is correct to insist that the rise of new types of states (and societies) leads to new epochs of conflict. TIMN has long implied the same (e.g., Ronfeldt, 1996, pp. 33-36). According to Bobbitt,

“ . . . Mindful of the past, we can expect a new epochal war in which a new form of the State — the market-state — asserts its primacy as the most effective constitutional means to deal with the consequences of the strategic innovations that won the Long War. To shape, if not permanently forestall, this war to come, the society of states must organize in ways that enable it to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to treat expeditionary interventions as opportunities for consensus-creating coalitions, and to share information as a means of defense against disguised attacks. By these means, the next epochal war can be converted into a series of interventions and crises, instead of a world-shattering cataclysm or a stultifying and repressive world order.” (p. 815)

In this new epoch, war will be more like crime, and nonstate adversaries will abound. And to affirm this view, Bobbitt focuses on al Qaeda, making good points that are often made by terrorism experts. But his main point is that al Qaeda fits his template, amounting to a malignant expression of a market state:

“The multinational mercenary terror network that Osama bin Laden and others have assembled is a malignant and mutated version of the market-state. . . . This network, of which Al Qaeda is only a part, greatly resembles a multinational corporation but that is simply to say that it is a market-state, made possible by advances in international telecommunications and transit, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. Lacking contiguous territory, Al Qaeda is a kind of virtual state . . . .” (p. 820, italics in orig.)

Thus, given the functions and structures that al Qaeda and its affiliates have built up, “we are fighting a virtual state and not just a stateless gang” (p. 821). This enemy is not only virtual, but also multinational, multifunctional, nonterritorial, and networked. Thus we’re seeing the world’s first major war between a market state and a nonstate network acting like a market state.

And from a bit of additional reading, I see that Bobbitt elaborates on these points in his next book, Terror and Consent, where he views al Qaeda as “the emergence of a global terrorist network that in many respects more closely resembled the multinational corporation than it did a government.”

“Unlike the terrorist groups with which we are familiar, Al Qaeda does not mimic the nation-state. The IRA, ETA, the PLO all are organized as tiny parodies of the hierarchical, militarized, ideologized nation-state. This is hardly surprising as each is engaged in a struggle for national liberation. By contrast, the multinational mercenary terror network that Usama bin Laden and others have assembled is a new and mutated version of the market-state. It resembles the organizational structure of VISA or MasterCard, with their radical decentralization more than the usual national government . . .” (p. 30)

When Bobbitt addresses whether al Qaeda is more like a “market state terrorist group” or a “virtual market state”, he says it could be described either way:

“Is al Qaeda a market state terrorist group because it shares the structure of the market state and its practices while defining itself by its rejection of market state ideology, or is it a virtual market state that attempts to maximize the opportunities of its citizens — the faithful — by creating a global caliphate where they can find lifestyles denied them by human-rights-respecting states? Al Qaeda could be described either way, depending . . . (p.64)

This way, Bobbitt makes an insistent case for his market-state view of al Qaeda. And it is tantalizing to read, for it sounds so perceptive and innovative. It makes a kind of sense. Yet, from a TIMN perspective, it seems a flawed, even misleading view — in three respects in particular.

First, Bobbitt’s depiction of al Qaeda errs in exalting the market form, at the expense of barely recognizing the presence of the tribal, institutional, and network forms. I remain of the view that al Qaeda and its affiliates amount more to an information-age amalgam of the tribal and network forms. The tribal form plays a larger role than Bobbitt acknowledges. At the same time, his approach to analysis is so intent on emphasizing the market form that it does not leave a distinct place for the rise of the network form (at least not as I see it).

Second, the postulation that a “global caliphate” would correspond to a kind of market state makes little sense, unless one plays a definitional game. Al Qaeda and its cohorts do not, to my knowledge, want a new caliphate that would be much like a modern market state. It would be constructed mainly around old traditions associated with the tribal and hierarchical institutional forms, far more than the open market form. And if it could be organized as a virtual state without a territorial capital — a very unlikely scenario — then it would surely be more about the network than the market form.

Third, while Bobbitt's approach leads to many solid policy and strategy recommendations for governments engaged in combating terrorism — e.g., build coalitions, form ad-hoc teams, share information, deploy networked sensors — many of these recommendations pertain more to the rise of the network form than to the maturing of the market form (or revision of the hierarchical form). As I indicated earlier, Bobbitt’s analysis conflates the market and network forms.

Critical views at other security blogs

While wondering about all this, I wandered around a few forward-looking security blogs I like. My cursory check indicates that, despite a widespread enduring admiration for many of Bobbitt’s points, I am not alone in raising doubts about his market-state template and its application to terrorism.

As Zenpundit’s Mark Zafranski notes (in 2005), al Qaeda and its cohorts don’t have a futuristic market state in mind, but rather something quite different and ancient:

“It is quite clear . . . that the Islamists have an entirely different and comprehensive alternative social contract in mind — The Sharia-State — which when they control territory they refer to as an “Emirate” or as a “Caliphate” (the former exemplified by Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and the latter entity encompassing the entire future territorial extent of the Ummah). . . . In other words, the fundamental preconditions for a market-state would be intolerable to a sharia-state making the latter a deadly 4GW rival of the former and not, as Bobbitt maintained, a variation.”

And according to Thomas Barnett (in 2008), Bobbitt’s terrorism analysis is more about the end of a trend in conflict, not the commencement of a new one:

“As I've said repeatedly, terrorism is, to me, what's left, not what's next — much less what's transcendent. . . . Thus I don't see the great need to totally revamp the political construct or risk defeat. . . . To me, the only grand strategy worth having today is a globalization-centric one, not a terror-centric one.”

Global Guerrillas’s John Robb emphasizes a different angle (in 2008), by noting that a market state, far from serving to defend against a new epoch of violence, may instead help foment it:

“It's very likely a market-state would reduce human worth to a mere economic value at the cost of the bonds that hold us together as a community. Perversely, this would serve to create the very violent groups that use terrorism to advance their own economic/social level, since no other values have any power to mitigate/dissuade an impulse to violence. In short, Bobbitt's market-state, a society legitimized by "choice" alone, is insufficiently credible as something we should a) help emerge and b) defend.”

Robb turns even more antithetical toward the market state (in 2009) after he detects a relationship between the recent economic mess and the rise of the American market state:

“NOTE: Philip Bobbitt got it wrong in his book, "The Shield of Achilles." The prosperous market-state he envisioned through constitutional reform isn't possible. The REAL market-state, the form of governance that that has truly embraced the global market system, is hollow. In effect, a state that doesn't place any barriers between itself and the global marketplace. As a result, the only real opportunities created by the emergence of the market-state are opportunities to steal extreme wealth.”

Meanwhile, as Red Team Journal’s John Sullivan and Adam Elkus warn (in 2009), criminal insurgencies are creating threats as severe as terrorism. And some exemplars, like those involving drug trafficking in Mexico, look and act like Bobbitt’s virtual market state:

“The global ebb and flow of illicit trade also produces a combination of the market states and virtual states, a kind of criminal empire where decentralized governance is an emergent process created by the interaction of feral cities, non-state organizations, and the global economy.”

Unlike the preceding bloggers, Sullivan and Elkus do not focus on Bobbitt; they make this remark in passing. Yet, it seems clear from their broader discussion that the structure and purpose of crime in Mexico may provide a better case of Bobbitt’s market-state notion than does al Qaeda. Yet, Sullivan and Elkus also seem to imply that the future belongs to which side — the Mexican government, or the crime syndicates — can best organize a network state.

Bobbitt’s award-winning book surely merits the many accolades it has received, especially for its historical materials. Yet, these bloggers are on the right track when it comes to wondering about the future. I agree with their criticisms; they are consistent with much that I’ve raised above. The late market state is an aging market-mad strain that may be more problematic than beneficial for the TIMN evolution of societies as a whole.

TO BE CONTINUED

Incidentals (5th of 5): a leftover storyline ending in fascism (via TIMN)

2010-03-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

What’s left for this scrapbook of incidental comments are three items that I couldn’t fit easily into the preceding posts, and that weren’t well composed anyway. But I include them, for they contain TIMN-related points about organizational trends among our adversaries.

Besides, I finally spotted a storyline for linking the three: To begin, states fail because their tribal/clan bases have failed. Next, criminal and terrorist enterprises spread amid state failure by operating like networked franchises. Finally, a new authoritarian state emerges that aims to amalgamate rather than separate the TIMN forms and their realms. It’s just a scenario — by now, a rather conventional one — but it serves to combine the pieces of this post. And its trajectory culminates with an abiding concern of mine: the resurgence of fascism.

* * *

Whenever I see the annual “failed states index” published by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, I wonder anew what such indexes might look like for failed tribes, failed markets, and failed networks. So, when Drew Conway’s Zero Intelligence Agents blog carried a post about “Building a Better Failed State Index” in July 2009, I speculated a bit that failed states are often tantamount to failed tribes (and/or clans):

Thus my question is: To what extent is a failed-states index a failed-tribes index? By which I mostly mean these kinds of possibilities: That a particular clan (or clan-like group) has gained exclusive control and is milking the state in criminal fashion. Or that clannish infighting among elites weakens a state beyond repair.

Of the fundforpeace.org indicators, the ones that most pertain to tribal/clan-like behavior are scattered, as follows:
One is social: I-3. Legacy of Vengeance-Seeking Group Grievance or Group Paranoia.
One is economic: I-5. Uneven Economic Development along Group Lines (but only the part that pertains to “Rise of communal nationalism based on real or perceived group inequalities”).
Three are political: I-7. Criminalization and/or Delegitimization of the State; I-10. Security Apparatus Operates as a "State Within a State"; I-11. Rise of Factionalized Elites.
Quite a scattering. And it reflects fact that the design of the index is geared to the standard view that state failure is a function of social, economic, and political factors . . .

Still, I’d like to see something different (though it’s beyond me to spell it out here and now): State failure as a function of the extent to which the tribal-clan form goes “wrong” in a society. Somalia, for an obvious example. (Not to mention that this form appears to be going wrong in areas of American society these days.)

I’m not implying that all tribal/clan behavior is indicative of state failure. Not at all. For example, nationalism can be positive for state success. So can deals for divvying up patronage and other spoils. Mexico did this quite well for decades.

Meanwhile it has become increasingly evident that where states fail because their tribal/clan bases have failed, new cavities may appear for criminal and terrorist organizations to take hold and expand their operations.

* * *

As a result of past interests, I keep an eye on how Al Qaeda — a slick exploiter of failed states and tribes — is being analyzed, especially its organization. Thus a post at the al Sahwa blog by Josh McLaughlin on “Al Qaeda: Franchise or Conglomerate?” in January 2010 attracted my attention:

As I recall, the franchise and conglomerate “business models” about Al Qaeda have been around sporadically for over five years. The franchise model was gaining sway in the mid 2000s. The conglomerate model emerged earlier (though I’ve misplaced a post-9/11 analysis that rendered Al Qaeda to look like one); but soon afterwards this model looked too corporate, too formally structured, to be accurate. As you notice, it may be more applicable today.

Most analysts and strategists, myself included, have preferred network models that were not so drawn from the business world. Even so, as I tried to point out back then (in 2005/updated 2007, p. 35), “while al-Qaeda may look amorphous, the deeper reality may be that it is polymorphous, deliberately shifting its shape and style to suit changing circumstances, including the addition of new, semiautonomous afﬁliates to the broader network.”

My own urging was, and still is, that Al Qaeda and its affiliates represent an innovative blend mainly of tribal and network forms of organization (pp. 45-46): “In short, al-Qaeda and its afﬁliates have formed a hybrid of the tribal and network designs — a tribalized network or networked tribe, so to speak, that includes bits of hierarchy and marketlike dynamics as well. The tribal paradigm has a striking advantage over the network, hierarchy, and other organizational paradigms. The latter models point to organizational design ﬁrst, and then to matters of leadership, doctrine, and strategy. But they have nothing clearly embedded in them about religion. As voiced in terrorism discussions, they are secular paradigms; religion is grafted on, as a separate matter. In contrast, the tribal paradigm is inherently fraught with dynamics that turn into religious matters, such as altruism toward kin, delineations between “us” and “them,” and codes of revenge. And that is another valuable reason to include the tribal paradigm in analyses of al-Qaeda and other terrorist movements.”

From this perspective, the term “confederation” may be currently as relevant as “conglomerate” since the former term often applies as to tribe-like actors that prefer loosely structured alliances. If Al Qaeda becomes stronger, the hierarchical form and its business and governance models are likely to gain sway.

Source: Al Qaeda and Its Affiliates: A Global Tribe Waging Segmental Warfare

McLaughlin made it clear in a detailed follow-up post that he was determined to lay out the conglomerate model as a sensible way to analyze aspects of Al Qaeda’s relations with its affiliates. I remained cautionary, partly as follows:

. . . For the moment, I’ll leave my notions about tribes and confederations to the side and observe the following:

It is surely worthwhile to ask what kinds of business models may help analysts and strategists understand AQ et al. If answering such a question is limited to looking at franchises and conglomerates as the most relevant models, then trends may indeed be evolving in the direction you emphasize. AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq], acc to the depiction you point to, has/had more formal structure than I’m used to seeing.

Yet, doesn't the notion of a conglomerate fit Iran’s IRGC a lot better than AQ and affiliates? If so, those are two hugely different entities. Perhaps a conglomerate is AQ’s aspiration, even for the core of a caliphate. At least I’d wonder about that. But AQ’s conglomerate aspects seem only nascent today. . . .

Even so, the literature on business models includes more than franchises and conglomerates. While I’m not very familiar with this literature, it now identifies a lot of innovative new designs that are viewed as “networks” and that don’t quite fit franchise, much less conglomerate, or other standard corporate models. The larger networks (in Silicon Valley? in northern Italy?) have firms that act as key hubs, and the overall network is multi-hub. Individual firms may be structured formally, not unlike the hierarchical AQI design you noted. But the network as a whole is not like that — it is not centrally planned and commanded, though there may be efforts at a kind of centralized coordination and communication. Similar networks are also emerging among activist civil-society NGOS as well. Wouldn’t this kind of business model be more apt for thinking about AQ et al.?

In publishing his analysis, McLaughlin explained that “my aim is to supplant ‘franchise’ with ‘conglomerate’ as the most representative business model for the relationship between AQ and its affiliate groups.” To his credit, he offers a loose concept of a conglomerate, in which the component entities, though subordinate, remain quite autonomous, choose their own leaders, and act on their own initiative.

Even so, I remain more attuned to the frequent depictions of Al Qaeda as a “network of franchises.” In this regard, a recent write-up by James Roberts makes appropriate points: “These events show that Al Qaeda franchisees are operating without need of direction from the corporate headquarters. Al Qaeda today is a flat, dispersed, multi-celled structure which executes on ‘commander’s intent’ not waiting for orders from above. Actors self radicalize, seek out and connect with inspirational figures like Al Aulaqi in Yemen, and execute plots independent of commands from senior leaders. This paper proposes a change in our approach. It argues that Al Qaeda is conducting an ‘outsurgency’ — similar to, but different from — an insurgency.”

Yet, Al Qaeda et al. may still turn out to be a shape shifter — adaptively polymorphous. Analysts should not get too attached to any particular model drawn from business literatures. And there is still the issue of what Al Qaeda would like to morph into, in the unlikely event it ever gains enough sway to found a new caliphate — its avowed future goal.

* * *

Along the way, in October 2009 I had a stray thought about the caliphate concept and decided to raise it at Zenpundit, in the comments section of a post about something more general that I can’t locate anymore:

I keep re-learning what a massive operation the IRGC is — tantamount to what Jane Jacobs termed a “monstrous moral hybrid” perhaps. The IRGC/IRG starts as an effort to consolidate various paramilitary forces following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Now it has its own ground, naval, air, and special forces. More interestingly, it has expanded economically, and acquired assets to become a multi-billions enterprise, including public construction projects, and even dentistry and travel. It can shut out private business competition, for it can easily underbid and then overrun, while also using recruits and conscripts as labor. In sum, it represents a hybrid of tribal, hierarchical, and market principles, if not network ones too.

Now, that supports the usual way of looking at this: just a gigantic hybrid operating inside a state, almost as a semi-autonomous state within a state. And that’s not uncommon in many countries. The Chinese and Cuban militaries are heavily involved in economic enterprises too. And in parallel fashion, this is a growing trend among criminal enterprises as well, like the Zetas mentioned in your reading recommendations above.

But then I had this stray thought: The IRGC is not so much a state within a state, as a caliphate within a state. I am not well-informed about how to define and think about caliphates. But the little I know leads me to think this might be a thought worth further consideration and analysis. Esp. if the IRGC could be considered as a model for an emerging Shia caliphate, and one that is way ahead of radical Sunni aspirations.

So: an emerging caliphate within a state. Any comment?

Safranski generously singled out my comment for a new post on “Pondering the Pasdaran” in October 2009. It soon became clear that I was rather ignorant about the nature of caliphates in Islamic history. But I rebounded:

. . . Much as I’ve tried to be informed about differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, my mind hadn’t grasped that Caliphates pertain almost entirely to Sunnis, Imamates to Shias, and that Shias are not particularly interested in having a Caliphate — though my main source (the Wikipedia entry on “Caliphate”) indicates exceptions (e.g., the Fatimid dynasty). So, much as I liked the turn of phrase — “a caliphate within a state” — today I see it’s evidently inadvisable to apply it to the IRGC.

. . . [But] I still wonder that something more is going on than is captured by the notion of a “state within a state” and related concepts. . . . A look at a RAND report from early this year — The Rise of the Pasdaran: Assessing the Domestic Roles of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (RAND, MG-821, 2009) — adds to understanding its economic reach, as a kind of conglomerate. This report compares the IRGC mainly to the case in China. Also, I’ve now spotted that the IRGC has expanded lately into energy and telecommunications.

What a hybrid amalgam!? The RAND report and other sources regard it mostly as just another complicated, expansive institution enmeshed in domestic factional politics, not to mention crime and corruption. And this results in a fairly conventional range of possible future scenarios. Yet, because of my TIMN efforts, I remain struck by the IRGC’s odd fusion of tribal, institutional, market, and network designs, and wonder more about unconventional scenarios.

My understanding of TIMN says that this kind of hybrid is dysfunctional over time. But it works for certain kinds of digressions from the mainstream of social evolution, and particularly for fascism, esp. if fascist tendencies are infused with millenarian tendencies like those we’ve discussed here at your blog previously (e.g., posts on Mahdism).

Trends in Iran and elsewhere, notably Venezuela, indicate that fascism’s allure is growing again around the world (though under other names). I’ve posted about this before, and I hope to do more. A good resource for getting back up to speed on the topic and its angles is the History News Network’s “HNN Special: A Symposium on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism,” for which Zenpundit provides a handy index here.

* * * Wrap-Up Remarks * * *

That’s all for these incidental musings from the past six or so months. Yet, since I see this blog still has some readers, I’ll add a few personal remarks before ending this series.

When I began assembling these incidentals, I guessed the folder held about 10-15 pages of material, which I’d spread over 3 or 4 posts. All done now, my computer says the total is nearly 45 pages; and I’ve distributed them across 5 posts. Much more than I’d expected. And that’s after trimming some comments, and not including various blurts left at other blogs I like. So, in a sense I've been more productive than I thought, but also more disorganized.

These incidental activities elsewhere have enabled me to refresh existing contacts, make interesting new ones, disseminate aspects of TIMN and STA, and just test out thoughts in passing as I roamed the blogosphere. I've enjoyed it. Yet, all in all, I have not found this to be a particularly productive endeavor for the development of either TIMN or STA. It's been too fragmentary. Less commenting elsewhere and more focused reading and writing via my own blog seems advisable.

As I’ve said before, my near-term goal for this blog is to enable me to post materials that have been sitting on my computer here at home for years about STA and TIMN matters. And now that the blog has existed for a year, the near-term goal also includes posting whatever new I come up with, in addition to processing the backlog that’s still in my computer.

Posting renders a sensation of quasi-publication — of being productive, making progress, remaining on track, in contact. Indeed, I decided to try blogging as an outlet after running into unusual resistance to publishing my updated draft on cyberocracy* in 2008 — a paper that involved many months of new work on my part (as well as by co-author Danielle Varda). Recently retired, I thus began to fret that I might be entering a long period of reading and writing about STA and TIMN in frustrating isolation, with unpublished drafts accumulating here at home. I could get through that, but it seemed a better idea to try blogging bits and pieces. And so far, it’s working pretty well.

I also have a long-term goal for the blog: a progressive accumulation over several years of what I know about the STA and TIMN frameworks. If this is accompanied by achieving formal publications elsewhere, all the better. If not, at least I will have stored enough in this repository to help others continue thinking about STA and TIMN. Maybe they (you?) can do a better job eventually. I remain convinced of the theoretical and practical potentials of these two sets of ideas.

Onward.

*This paper remains posted at ssrn.com. A welcome development is that the update sections are appearing as a chapter in Irving Louis Horowitz (Editor), Culture and Civilization: Beyond Positivism and Historicism (2010).