This time a couple of anarchist writings. First The Leaderless Revolution – how ordinary people will take power and change politics in the the 21st century Carne Ross(2011)
There are four simple ideas at the heart of The Leaderless Revolution. Together, they suggest a radically different approach to conducting our affairs.
The first is that in an increasingly interconnected system, such as the world emerging in the twenty-first century, the action of one individual or a small group can affect the whole system very rapidly. Imagine the world as a sports stadium, where a “wave” can be started by just one person, but quickly involves the whole crowd. Those most powerful are right beside us;and we—in turn—are best placed to influence them. A suicide bomber acts, assaults his enemy and recruits others all in one horrible action: a technique with such effect that it has spread from Sri Lanka to Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, Bali, London and New York within a few short years. But the same lesson is taught, with greater force, by peaceful acts, a truth shown by Mahatma Gandhi as well as the heroic young women, some still unknown, who refused to move to the back of the bus in the 1950s and 1960s American South. Modern network theory shows how one action can rapidly trigger change throughout the whole system. One person becomes a group, then becomes a movement; one act believed in and repeated by others becomes material, dramatic change.
The second key idea is that it is action that convinces, not words. New research is now demonstrating what good theater directors have always known: Show, don’t tell. The actions of those people closest to us—and not government policy or even expert opinion—are the most influential. This means that Internet petitions are not likely to bring about fundamental change, although they might make the signatory feel better (which may indeed be the purpose). Likewise, social media may help organize and inform larger groups in ways that have never been available before, but unless this organization is used for a purpose—to do something—it is worthless. In contrast to asking for or voting for someone else to do it, action can address the problem directly. There is an education intrinsic to action—you have to learn about the problem to solve it, for most problems are complex. This education reverses the infantilization and ignorance that authority encourages: You need not worry about the details, because we will take care of it. Equally, it demolishes the common notion that ordinary people are somehow incapable of making intelligent decisions about their own circumstances. Again, evidence shows this to be an arrogant fallacy—people know their own circumstances best of all.
The third key idea is about engagement and discussion. Again it is a simple idea: Decision making is better when it includes the people most affected. In the current Western model of representative democracy, we have become accustomed to the idea that politicians, elected by us, should negotiate among competing interests and make the necessary compromises to produce consensus and policy. In Washington today, it is painfully clear that this is the opposite of what is actually happening, while in Europe political consensus around the social democratic model is breaking down. The far right is emerging once more as a significant political force, in reaction to the largely unpredicted and sometimes violent changes that the world is now experiencing. In times of uncertainty, the false appeal of those who loudly proclaim certainty gains luster. In Brazil, Britain and New Orleans, a better way of deciding our affairs together is emerging (and it is not the Internet, or on the Internet). It resembles democracy in its earliest and purest days—people gathering together, not in chat rooms, to make real decisions for themselves, not voting for others to decide on their behalf, or merely ventilate their frustrated opinions in town hall meetings or on the World Wide Web. When lobbyists fill what used to be called the people’s parliaments and congresses, this alternative “participatory” democracy offers something unfamiliar yet extraordinary.
When large numbers of people make decisions for themselves, the results are remarkable: Everyone’s views are heard, policies take all interests into account (as all lasting policy must), and are thus fairer. Facts and science are respected over opinion. Decision making becomes transparent (and thus less corrupt), respectful and less partisan—people who participate in decisions tend to stick to them. More responsibility and trust in society can only come about by giving real decision-making responsibility to people. If you do not give people responsibility, they tend to behave irresponsibly, and sometimes violently. Happily, the converse is also true—give people power and responsibility, and they tend to use it more wisely—and peacefully. This hints at the fourth idea that suffuses the argument throughout The Leaderless Revolution: agency—the power to decide matters for ourselves. We have lost agency. We need to take it back. We have become too detached from the decisions most important to us; we are disconnected, alienated, including from each other. This has contributed to a deeper ennui about modern life: What is it all for? Where is the meaning? What is the point? And in the solution to this crisis, which is both personal and political, something profound may be available. If we take back agency, and bring ourselves closer to managing our affairs for ourselves, then something else may also come about: We may find a fulfillment and satisfaction, and perhaps even a meaning, which so often seems elusive in the contemporary circumstance.
These four ideas form the core of the philosophy of The Leaderless Revolution. Adopt these ideas, above all act upon them, and things will change. The book is intended as a guide and not a prescription. It sets out a method of doing things and taking action, and not what the outcome of this method should be. That is for everyone—acting together—to determine, and no single individual can pretend to know it, let alone a writer tapping away on a laptop. No one can claim to know what others truly want. These needs and concerns—and dreams—can only be expressed through action, shared decision-making and discussion with those most affected, including those who might disagree. But this method is the essence of a new form of politics, indeed a new way of living together on our crowded planet.
The Peaceful Revolutionary recently celebrated James C Scott, the famous
academic anarchist
The historian James C. Scott, drawing on archaeological and anthropological evidence across multiple continents, showed that early human communities were far more mobile, flexible, and resistant to fixed hierarchy than we tend to assume. Hunter-gatherer bands moved seasonally, following resources rather than claiming them. When things got scarce, they moved on. When they returned, the land had recovered. This wasn’t accident. It was a practice developed, transmitted, and refined across generations. It was called the commons.
‘Ours’ before ‘mine’
The commons begins, as most things do, with family. Think about how resources move within a household. Nobody invoices their partner for cooking dinner. Nobody charges their child for the use of a bedroom. There’s no market inside a family, because the relationships are organised around need and reciprocity rather than transaction. What’s mine is available to you, what’s yours is available to me, and we’re both better off for it. This logic extended outward, to neighbours, to the village, to the wider community, for most of human history. The commons wasn’t a formal institution imposed from above, it was the natural shape that cooperation takes when people live closely together and depend on the same land.
Scholars used to assume, following Adam Smith, that before money there was barter, that people traded wheat for shoes and meat for pots in a primitive version of the marketplace. The anthropologist David Graeber spent years looking for ancient evidence of this barter economy and couldn’t find any. No society has ever been documented that organised itself primarily through the exchange of goods between individuals. What actually existed, everywhere, were systems of mutual obligation, gift, and reciprocal support. The shoemaker didn’t trade shoes for wheat, the community fed the shoemaker, and the shoemaker kept everyone’s feet dry. Debts were social rather than financial. Memory and relationship did the work that money later claimed to do. This matters because the standard story, that markets are natural and ownership is instinctive and competition is the default, is not history. It’s a story told backwards, projecting the assumptions of the present onto a past that worked very differently.
How the commons worked
In medieval England, most of the land was managed as commons. Villagers held strips of arable land for their own crops, but the woodlands, meadows, and pastures surrounding the village were shared. These weren’t free-for-alls. They were governed by detailed, locally negotiated rules about how many animals each family could graze, when different areas could be used, and how much timber could be taken and for what purpose. The rights had names: pasture (grazing), estovers (collecting wood for fuel and repairs) piscary (fishing), pannage (letting pigs forage in woodland), and turbary (cutting peat). These were customary entitlements, handed down and understood, later enforced by the community through the manorial courts. If someone overgrazed their allocation, neighbours would say so. Social pressure, reputation, and long memory were the mechanisms of governance.
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