Abstract
Adler’s (2019) splendid book displays a particular kind of hope, a hope that I share and applaud. That is the idea that we can build or repurpose our institutions in order to help us deal with the four great emergencies that human beings face—climate, ecology, democracy, and inclusion. There is no question that this requires radical thought and action, because it seems to both of us that corporate capitalism is incapable of saving itself. The question I will briefly consider in this response to Adler’s book is whether his faith in the state is warranted, and whether his broadly state socialist solution is incommensurable with more grassroots, localist, and anarchist inspired alternatives.
I’m going to assume that the core problem, for those on the broadly green left, is how to help to grow forms of organization which are not producing externalities that destroy the planet whilst enriching only a small proportion of its inhabitants. This means examining a variety of possibilities of scale, governance, regulation, ownership and so. Authors such as Unger (1998, 2004) and Wright (2010) have suggested an “experimental” or “utopian” approach to thinking about how we should design the institutions of the future, and I agree with them (Parker et al., 2007, 2014). It seems to me that we should have no preference for any one particular assemblage over another and hence avoid imagining that co-ops, for example, are the answer to every question. The same goes for localization, citizens assemblies, regulation, the welfare state, a world government or whatever general purpose solution is being proposed. It all depends, and it seems most likely to me that we will need different shapes and sizes of organizations to address different problems. We need saws, hammers and drills to build things but wouldn’t assume that one of those tools was better than the other. We need them all.
In this regard, the state is a very interesting idea. As a form of organization based on the monopoly of violence within a given territory it has gained many enthusiasts and critics over the last few hundred years. We can certainly suggest that it has been effective in terms of constructing complex and interlocking systems of centralized governance and regulation. It is good at concentrating power and visibility in central locations, and then using these mechanisms to arrange a particular part of the earth in certain ways (Scott, 1998). This gives it reach and leverage, which means that the leaders of states can sometimes mobilize considerable human and non-human resource to reorganize the world—whether these be dams and armies or universal education and healthcare.
Yet if we take the state as an example of organization, then we can see clearly why it makes sense not to imagine that it is the answer to every problem. States have co-ordinated effective vaccination programs for millions of their inhabitants, but they have also fought each other over their territorial claims, administered ethnic cleansing programs, and wasted resources on vainglorious palaces. They have produced forms of regulation aimed at raising the wages of the lowest paid, and at preventing the most egregious forms of discrimination, but have also been captured by corporate elites, featherbedding bureaucrats and professional politicians who wriggle away from accountability.
No wonder, given these problems with many states, that localist and anarchist politics has often articulated itself as “grassroots,” a metaphor that suggests the beauties of smallness, embeddedness and multiplicity. Rather than regulation descending from the legislators in Capital City, thinkers in these traditions would tend to assume that the most effective forms of organization are proximal, that the “economy” works best when it is local and re-embedded (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Schumacher, 1973; Scott, 1998). Democracy is also imagined as something prefigurative and continual—not restricted to a ceremony in which citizens visit a building appointed by the state once every few years. For anarchists, post-capitalists and those celebrating community economies, ethos and accountability are best understood as face-to-face matters.
This all might sound rather attractive, and it is again easy to imagine that it is the answer to all our questions. The state and the party need to be left behind in the graveyard of history with all the other tumbled statues, and we can move away from gigantism and toward the human scale. But this sort of romanticism is too simple. We know that communities can be narrow and exclusionary places and that small groups can be dominated by powerful voices who do not reflect on their privilege. There are practical problems too, because fragile alternatives often find it hard to survive in a hostile or indifferent environment. The small can’t easily displace the infrastructure, routines and habits that make high carbon capitalism so embedded, so the co-operative bakery will find it hard to compete with the supermarket next to the motorway. And as this indicates, there is a problem with scale here, such that grassroots organizing cannot necessarily reach other spaces, other identities, communities, and problems. It is specific, which is what makes it powerful when emplaced, but that specificity also means that it is not necessarily mobile, and that it doesn’t multiply well.
The 99 Percent Economy tends to place a lot of faith in the state for quite understandable reasons, and Adler’s comments about other levels of organizing reflect this sense that he quite likes his local co-operative bakery but doesn’t see it as world-changing. The revolution will not arrive one artisanal sourdough loaf at a time. This is quite an old face-off, going back to Marx’s hostility to Bakunin’s anarchist federalism, and Engels’ dismissal of the utopian socialists. But why do we have to choose between these two strategies, and are there only two choices? It seems to me that there is a danger of falling into some old thinking, and some old traps, if we simply assume that our choice is between “democratic socialism” or “the grassroots.” So let me try to reframe the problem.
Human beings are organizing animals, and we have spent our history on this planet experimenting with different forms of social order. History and anthropology are documents of variety, of the astonishing ways in which we have arranged ourselves—monarchies and communes, matriarchies and clans, imperial empires, and isolated hill villages. One of the dimensions here is scale, but only one, because we can also describe different forms of ownership, inheritance, market, audit, sanction, and so on. In other words, there are many different elements of organization that allow us to distinguish between the transnational mega-corporation, the ecovillage and the city state. To suggest that all organizing is either “state” or “grassroots” is like suggesting that all tools are either saws or hammers. A quick glance shows us that there are rather more possibilities than that.
So rather than assuming that we already know the size and shape of the solution, why not think about the variety of problems we need to respond to? If the issue concerns the payment of some sort of global carbon tax on aviation fuel, the state is unlikely to be the obvious platform because we will need trans-state action. If we want to ensure that workers feel a sense of efficacy over the economic choices they make at work, then many small co-operatives might be the answer. If regions or provinces within states need closer control over their energy and transportation infrastructure, then Capital City needs to give up control, not maintain it. But if we want a national health service, then some sort of state level bureaucracy needs to exist to pay for it and maintain it.
I am not hostile to democratic socialism, and all states would be made much greener and fairer if Adler’s proposals were immediately enacted. The difficulty I have is with the way that his analysis, subtle though it is, makes all other forms of organizing into secondary considerations. Capturing the state so that it regulates for the high-road is laudable, but it gives the state a prominence which will not help to build a broad coalition, and instead runs the danger of sedimenting an elderly distinction between the party politician and the community organizer, between entryism and activism, between Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions” and the International Workers of the World’s “building of a new world in the shell of the old.”
This is a journal of critical organization theory, so let me express this in organizational terms. I think that the most important issue is to develop an experimental approach to organizing, one taught within Schools for Organizing (Parker, 2018), and that makes no particular assumptions about the general purpose effectiveness of any one organizational form. Sometimes massive co-ordination will be necessary, sometimes federalism, sometimes local autonomy. Markets work well for some products, services and people, and badly for others. Collective ownership can avoid the problem of capital rents, but not of complacency and occupational protectionism. Having a preference for the small shouldn’t mean that we fail to recognize the importance of the big, but neither should we imagine the local as an Arcadian land of tranquility. Adler’s book is quite correct in its diagnosis of the problem, but let’s use all the tools in the box, and invent some new ones while we are at it.
