Chapter 1
1. Peter Ryley, looking at Victor Brenford and Patrick Geddes’ work, ‘Our Social Inheritance’, speaks about a practical application of the idea of utopia. He says:
‘The future society that Geddes envisaged would be dynamic rather than static, based on continuing evolution. He refers to a ‘Eutopia’. The name emerged from Thomas More’s famous book, Utopia. Geddes suggests that More was punning two ancient Greek words which would sound similar, Outopia, signifying no place, and Eutopia, a good and beautiful place. By contracting the title to utopia, More was indicating that he could be describing either or both. This intended sense became lost and the more cynical ‘nowhere’ became the commonly understood meaning. However, by choosing to be unambiguous about the sense of a good place Geddes was trying to insist that its achievement is practical and possible. This is because, for Geddes, action and Eutopia are one. Ideas and actions cannot be divorced from each other, and what is more, his model of Eutopia is a model of pragmatism. Eutopia is “the reliable best that can be made of the here and now, if we invoke and use all of the resources available, physical, mental and moral.”’
Peter Ryley — Making Another World Possible — Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain.
2. ‘The greatest difference between the Christian Utopian past of Eden and the other myths is that there is no Fall. There is always some explanation for why the Utopian past ended, but never the complete break that the Fall represents. As a result, Utopianism is not heretical. [By contrast, to try to recreate Eden would be a heresy for Christianity, as it would deny the Fall.] The other myths also differ from the Greek myth of the golden age in that in the Greek myth there is a series of separate creations that lead to the development of the non-Utopian present, while in the other cultures there are no separate creations and no clean break. This means that the Utopian past is not necessarily lost and can be used as a model for the future. This is particularly important in China because the belief is that both the Confucian and Taoist Utopias had once actually existed, and therefore they could exist again if the principles on which they were based are rightly understood and then put into practice.’
Lyman Tower Sargent — Utopianism — A Very Short Introduction.
3. ‘It is work that realises the full potential of human personality. Proudhon felt that work is a necessity, not merely as an act of production but also of moral education. Thus, the actions of individuals are not merely restrained through contractual arrangements [it seems Proudhon believed in a voluntary contract by individuals, rather than some agreement to state control] but are also shaped by the establishment of a natural moral order. The removal of work lets loose the inherent evil of humanity and destroys the self-restraint and communal interconnectedness that labour inculcates in those who are neither exploited nor exploiters. For Proudhon, those who view human nature as being shaped by the environment and as mutable into something better through a change in the environment are indulging in Utopian speculation. Practical experience would suggest otherwise. Human nature does not change, but human behaviour can if both constrained and encouraged by a just, free and moral society.
‘Proudhon’s second objection to radical conventional wisdom is more material. He thought that a state of abundance is a physical impossibility. His general view of the ‘parsimony of nature’ and the need to work to overcome it leads him to reject the notion of the, even technologically induced, possibility of abundance. Proudhon did not feel that the problem of production could be solved. Instead, he was an early advocate of the limits to growth. This was not on ecological grounds, but on the view that the power of production would never match the power of consumption. This is because the possibility of consumption is almost infinite, whilst that of production can never be so. Therefore it is necessary to live with voluntary restraints on consumption if people are to exist in relative equality. Abundance is a chimera; he concluded: “Man’s condition on Earth is work and poverty; his vocation learning and justice; the first of his virtues temperance.”
‘This is often quoted as a way of claiming that Proudhon was an austere ascetic, and advocate of a simple life. In fact, this is based on a misunderstanding of the term ‘poverty’. Like ‘property’, Proudhon used the term in a distinct, idiosyncratic way. Poverty in everyday usage means relative or absolute deprivation. This Proudhon called ‘pauperism’. A state of near-destitution caused by the expropriation of the value of the labour of the many by the few. In contrast, Proudhon’s concept of poverty means relative equality and a voluntary restraint on consumption. It mirrors Gandhi’s often-quoted statement that there is enough in this world for every man’s need but not every man’s greed. Proudhon did not merely advocate poverty in this sense; he celebrated it.
‘ “Poverty is an inevitable law of nature. It is wealth that is a distortion of nature. Wealth is based on undeserved expropriation. Poverty is the product of honest labour and equitable exchange….
“Poverty is seemly…. Its dwelling is clean, healthy and in good repair… and it is neither pale nor starving.
“Poverty is not ease. For the worker this would be a form of corruption. It is no good for man to live at ease. He must, on the contrary feel the pricks of need… poverty has its own joys, its innocent festivities and homely luxuries….
“It is clear that it would be misplaced to dream of escaping from the inevitable poverty that is the law of our nature and of society. Poverty is good, and we must think of it as being the source of all our joys. Reason demands that we should live with it — frugally, modifying our pleasures, labouring assiduously and subordinating all our appetites to justice.”
Peter Ryley — Making Another World Possible — Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain. Ryley in turn quotes from: Edward Hyams — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind and Works and Stewart Edwards — Selected Writings.
Chapter 2
1. Henry George explains wealth: ‘Thus wealth […] consists of natural products that have been secured, moved, combined, separated, or in other ways modified by human exertion, so as to fit them for the gratification of human desires. It is, in other words, labor impressed upon matter in such a way as to store it up […]. Wealth is not the sole object of labor, for labor is also expended in ministering directly to desire, [‘services’] but it is the object and result of what we call productive labor which gives value to material things. Henry George — Progress and Poverty.
George goes on to describe the factors of production: ‘Land, labor, and capital are the factors of production. The term land includes all natural opportunities or forces; the term labor, all human exertion; and the term capital, all wealth used to produce more wealth. In returns to these three factors is the whole produce distributed. That part which goes to the land owners for the use of natural opportunities is called rent; that part which constitutes the reward for human exertion is called wages; and that part which constitutes the return for the use of capital is called the interest. These terms mutually exclude each other.’
A further reference explores these definitions a little further:
‘Wealth is the stock of all assets, regardless of whether they are used as an input to the production process or not. This includes machinery, land, real estate, intellectual property rights, art and jewellery… [C]apital is a subset of wealth which is used in the production process to create more wealth. Therefore all capital is wealth but not all wealth is capital. Therefore every type of wealth other than land which is used in the production process to produce more wealth is called capital.’ Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie MacFarlane — Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing.
2. The scarcity of money, in turn, refers back to ‘mercantilism’ — named possibly because of the importance of the merchant class, but possibly also referring to Tomaso Mercado — where hoarding money (or, originally, goods) was seen as a sensible move by the rich in times of economic uncertainty. It was a view contested by, amongst others, Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. We see, however, the return to mercantilism with such policies as austerity, quantitative easing, and the trading practices under neo-liberalism.
3. With reference to ‘Property is theft’, Ryley says:
‘Proudhon was making a vital distinction between what he called property and possession. It is very close to Hodgkin’s distinction between the natural and artificial right of property. Property is the device by which the rights of ownership are appropriated by others and used to extort value of labour from the workers. It is an unconditional, perpetual and legal right. Possession is the conditional right of ownership for use without giving the ultimate right of disposal. It ensures that the products of labour directly belong to the labourer. Possession transforms society from one based on hierarchy to one based on equality; it is in essence revolutionary.’
Ryley goes on to quote from Proudhon:
‘The people, even those who are Socialists, whatever they may say, want to be owners; and … I find the feelings of the masses on this point stronger and more resistant than on any other question… And one thing is to be noted which shows how far, in the minds of people, individual sovereignty is identified with collective sovereignty, that the more ground the principles of democracy have gained, the more I have seen the working classes, both in the city and in the country, interpret these principles favourably to individual ownership.’
Peter Ryley — Making Another World Possible — Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain. (The Proudhon quote is from General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century.)
4. ‘In his essay, Notes on Liberty and Property, Allen Tate gave us an indispensable anatomy of our problem. His essay begins by equating, not liberty and property, but liberty and control of one’s property. He then makes the crucial distinction between ownership that is merely legal and what he calls ‘effective ownership’. If a property, say a small farm, has one owner, then the one owner has an effective and assured, if limited, control over it — as long as he or she can afford to own it, and is free to sell it or use it, and (I will add) free to use it poorly or well. It is clear also that effective ownership of a small property is personal and therefore can, at least possibly, be intimate, familial and affectionate. If, on the contrary, a person owns a small quantity of stock in a large corporation, then that person has surrendered control of that property to large stake-holders. The drastic mistake our people made, as Tate believed, and I agree, was to be convinced “that there is one kind of property — just property, whether it be a thirty-acre farm in Kentucky or a stock certificate in the United States Steel Corporation.”’ Wendell Berry — It all Turns on Affection. (Author’s emphases.)
5. For a brief discussion of stocks and shares, see Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism. He gives some more detail in, Economics: The User’s Guide. For instance, the following:
‘Preferred shares give their holders priority in the payment of dividends, namely, profits distributed to shareholders, rather than ‘retained’ by the corporation. But that priority is bought at the cost of the right to vote for key decisions concerning the company — such as who to appoint as the top managers, how much to pay them and whether to merge with, take over or be taken over by another company. The shares that come with the right to vote on these things are called ordinary shares. The ‘ordinary’ shareholders (who are anything but ordinary in terms of their decision-making power) make collective decisions through votes. These votes are usually according to the one-share-one-vote rule, but in some countries some shares have more votes than others….
‘These days, few very large companies are majority-owned by a single shareholder, like the capitalists of old. The Porsche-Piech family, which owns just over 50 percent of the Porsche-Volkswagen group, is a notable exception.
‘There are still a considerable number of giant companies that have a dominant shareholder, who owns sufficient shares that he/she/it can usually determine the company’s future. Such a shareholder is described as owning a controlling stake, usually defined as anything upwards of 20 percent of the voting shares.
‘Mark Zuckerberg, who owns 28 percent of Facebook, is a dominant shareholder. The Wallenberg family of Sweden is the dominant shareholder in Saab (40 percent), Electrolux (30 percent) and Ericsson (20 percent).
‘Most large companies don’t have one controlling shareholder. Their (share) ownership is so dispersed that no single shareholder has effective control. For example, as of March 2012, Japan Trustee Savings Bank, the biggest shareholder of Toyota Motor Corporation, owned just 10 percent of Toyota’s shares. The next two biggest shareholders owned around 6 percent each. Even acting in unison, these three together do not have a quarter of the votes.
‘Dispersed ownership means that professional managers have effective control over most of the world’s largest companies, despite not owning any significant stake in them — a situation known as the separation of ownership and control. This creates a principal-agent problem, in which the agents (professional managers) may pursue business practices that promote their own interests rather than those of their principals (shareholders).
Ha-Joon Chang — Economics: The User’s Guide. (Author’s emphases.)
Chang goes on to describe two tier management systems. He says:
‘Under this system, known as the co-determination system, the managerial board … has to get most important decisions, such as merger and plant closure, approved by the ‘supervisor board’, in which worker representatives have half the votes, even although the managerial side appoints the chairman, who has the casting vote.’
Ha-Joon Chang — Economics: The User’s Guide. (Author’s emphases.)
Chapter 3
1. ‘Privatise. Profit or loss is privatised when it accrues wholly to an individual (or, with less precision, to a collection of individuals called a legal person, eg. a corporation).
‘Commonise. Gains and losses that are spread out indifferently over a whole population are said to be commonised. The commons … is an ‘unmanaged commons’, in contrast to the type to be mentioned next.
‘Socialise. When profits and losses are differentially distributed by managers (bureaucrats) among the group that owns the common property we say that the property is socialised. The system that does this may be called ‘socialism’; it is also called a ‘managed commons’. A managed commons, though it may have other defects, is not automatically subject to the tragic fate of an unmanaged commons….’
[The tendency within capitalism is for gains to be privatised and losses to be commonised — ie. indifferently (and often blindly) paid by others. The managed commons — what the author here refers to as socialising gains and losses — is the preferred option.]
‘The idea of negative responsibility is likewise a paradoxical concept but an immensely useful one. The unmanaged commons exhibits negative responsibility, since it actually pays the individual decision maker to make the wrong decision. It is this negative responsibility that generates the tragedy.’
Garrett Hardin — Filters Against Folly. (Author’s emphasis.)
2. It has to be said that ‘socialising’ the commons, for Hardin, is not what we might take it to mean with a simple reading. It was owners recognising responsibilities, or heavy state intervention, which, he believed, would be the cure for the ‘tragedy’. Hardin also related his arguments (in a Malthusian way) to population — or, over-population — as he would have it. He spoke against compassion and co-operation being likely to yield favourable results. So, it is understandable that many left-leaning thinkers find his views decidedly dodgy. There may still have been a commons but it was a long way from what others, such as Elinor Ostrom, Murray Bookchin or Massimo de Angelis would understand by the term. At least everyone seems to have agreed on the potential tragedy and the reasons why it might occur. For further reading, see Derek Wall’s Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals.
3. Some authors (including Jonathan Porritt — Capitalism as if the World Matters, Massimo d’Angelis — Omnia Sunt Communia, and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt — Commonwealth) describe what I have called natural commons as common wealth or natural capital. One difficulty with these terms is that they imply some kind of right of ownership over nature. Also, the implication is that natural resources are already somehow ‘wealth’, or ‘capital’, which is not correct in terms of the normal definitions of these terms. Some even lump all of nature into these terms, common wealth or natural capital. No distinction is made between what is resource and what is best left to wilderness. This is the tricky balance that needs to be achieved. (Dieter Helm (Natural Capital — Valuing the Planet) unfortunately uses this phrase natural capital, and is rather dismissive of the splitting off of wild nature, which I emphasise in this work. Nevertheless his book sets a benchmark — that the aggregate level of natural capital should not diminish. We may quibble with definitions, but this is at least a policy that shares the concerns I am raising in this book.)
4. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore tell us:
‘Money isn’t capital. Capital is journalism’s shorthand for money or, worse, a stock of something that can be transformed into something else. If you’ve ever heard or used the terms national capital or social capital, you’ve been part of a grand obfuscation. Capital isn’t the dead stock of uncut trees or unused skill… capital happens only in the live transformation of money into commodities and back again. Money tucked away under a mattress is as dead to capitalism as the mattress itself. It is through the live circulation of money, and in the relations around it, that capitalism happens.
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore — A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.
(Despite the authors’ concerns, I feel that social capital is a valid description, as this does indeed involve transactions and transformations.)
5. We could add (from Guy Standing — The Plunder of the Commons) the Judiciary (Common Law), the Information Commons (libraries, newspapers, the internet), the Intellectual Commons (ideas) and the Educational Commons (learning procedures). These last three (according to Standing) are all part of the Knowledge Commons.
6. Elinor Ostram’s suggestions for managing the commons: 1. Some kind of boundary — a commons is for a specific community, not just for anyone. 2. Locally-established rules for managing the commons — because ecologies are so diverse, local rules need to be established, but still taking cognisance of county, national and international regulations. 3. Those sharing the commons need to be able to participate in the making and modifying of the rules. 4. The commons needs to be monitored to assure adherence to the rules. 5. There should be a graduated system of sanctions for rule-breakers — a verbal warning for those who may have broken a rule by accident, minor sanctions for those whose offences are minor, and so on. 6. A local body — perhaps very informal — to manage conflict resolution. 7. Some kind of official recognition of the right of the commoners to organise their commons as set out above. 8. The local commons organisation to be nested within a wider network of managed commons.
Adapted from Derek Walls’, Elinor Ostram’s Rules for Radicals and in turn based on Ostram’s main work, Governing the Commons. A more detailed summary of Ostram’s work is given in David Fleming’s Lean Logic.
7. Fee and dividend and sovereign wealth funds tend to distribute the gains from the use of the commons equally amongst whole populations. Some take the view, however, that ‘property rights’ for natural commons should be issued to individuals, or more local communities, and these people should be compensated directly. In this scenario, it may be difficult to assess exactly who is responsible for paying and who should receive the payments. See Ronald Coase — The Problem of Social Cost.
Chapter 4
1. To distinguish between a political movement as opposed to just chaos, note the difference between ‘Anarchy’ and ‘Anarchism’. More recent authors use the term Anarchism in preference to Anarchy, but older works still often refer to Anarchy.
2. ‘… anarchism divides loosely into two categories: (1) collectivism, with the emphasis on the individual within a voluntary association of individuals and (2) individualist, with the emphasis on the individual separate from any association. The former is sometimes divided into communist anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism [where production is the main focus of collaborative efforts]; the latter is usually divided into individualist anarchism and anarcho-capitalism, also known as minimalism or libertarianism.’
Lyman Tower-Sargent — Contemporary Political Ideologies.
Further, and very useful, observations on anarchism can be gleaned from Cindy Milstein’s, Anarchism and Its Aspirations. She starts with this rather puzzling quote from Proudhon’s What is Property?
‘… as man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.’
Milstein comments:
‘To fill out this definition a bit further, let’s look at the two sides of that phrase. Anarchism is a synthesis of the best of liberalism and the best of communism, elevated and transformed by the best of libertarian Left traditions that work towards an egalitarian, voluntary[sic] and nonhierarchical society. The prospect of liberalism in the broadest sense is to ensure personal liberty. Communism’s overarching project is to ensure the communal good…. Anarchism understood that this tension is positive, as a creative and inherent part of human existence.’ (pp.13/14)
Further on in the same work:
‘… anarchism grounded itself in a set of shared values. These revolved around interconnected notions such as liberty and freedom, solidarity and internationalism, voluntary association and federation. Education, spontaneity and harmony, and mutual aid… The early anarchists thus began our ongoing efforts to bring forth self-determination and self-organization, self-management and self-governance, as the basis for society.’
(pp. 25/26)
And further:
‘First and foremost anarchism is a revolutionary political philosophy. That is, anarchism is thoroughly radical in the true sense of the word: to get at the root or origin of phenomena, and from there to make dramatic changes in the existing conditions… Anarchism is not satisfied with remaining on the surface, merely tinkering to make a damaged world a little less damaging. It is a thoroughgoing reimagining and restructuring of society. It views this as essential if everyone is to be free, and if humanity is to harmonize itself with the nonhuman world….
‘… Anarchism is therefore staunchly anticapitalist, which ensures that it is a revolutionary politics. Since battling such primary systems necessarily means getting to the root of them, moving beyond capitalism and states would entail nothing less than turning the world upside down, breaking up all monopolies, and reconstituting everything in common — from institutions to ethics to everyday life.’
(pp.31/32/33)
And further:
‘… becoming an anarchist is also a process — without end — of applying an ethical compass to the whole of what one (and everyone) is and could be individually and socially.’
(p.41)
And finally:
‘Mutual aid … stresses reciprocal relations, regardless of whether the gift is equal in kind. Humans give back to each other in a variety of ways — the inequality of equals. Individuals and societies flourish because the different contributions are not only equally valued but combine to make a general whole.’
(p.57)
3. Ryley, looking at individual and collectivist forms of anarchism, brings out the distinction between emphasising production and emphasising consumption. ‘Individualism and anarchist communism shared a number of features. Both were hostile to capitalism and, especially, the rise of the corporation. In particular, they were critical of the wage system and the alienation of the products of labour from the producer. “Wagedom”, as Donisthorpe called it, was thought to be a regime that was exploitative and reduced the worker to little more than a slave. Both varieties, too, shared a particular class analysis that saw an intimate relationship between political power and modern capitalism. The state was also seen, in essence, as the expression of the power of a dominant class, however that class was constituted. It was in itself inevitably exploitative. Both variants denied the existence of a social contract or that democratic government could ever express a general will or lead to an explicit consent to be governed. As such, neither of the two movements saw political action through the state as in any way being a process of liberation. This could only come through voluntary and spontaneous direct action by the people themselves. Above all, both movements had heretical views on the great Victorian religion of progress. Despite this, the possibility of cultural and intellectual progress was central to their beliefs; they were, for instance, both trenchant advocates of gender equality and they rejected the purely material concept of progress based on unending economic growth fuelled by consumerism.
‘However, the differences were no less profound. Central to the dispute between the two was the concept of property. Individualism drew on an older tradition that viewed forms of property as a guarantor of individual independence and economic security and as a device that ensured the full value of labour was gained by the labourer. The distinction individualists drew was between valid and invalid forms of property. For communists, property was in itself a system of expropriation and an institution founded on injustice, which perpetuated exploitation. It was an unbridgeable chasm. This fundamental disparity fuelled all other differences between them. On distribution and exchange, communists relied on the old slogan of “to each according to their needs”, denying the necessity of any formal exchange at all. Individualists placed exchange at the centre of their political economy, basing it on contract and free currencies. This, in turn, was reflected in contrasting views of social organisation. Communists relied on spontaneous collectivist organisation, individualists on mutualism, universal self-employment and an end to monopoly or the possibility of monopolisation. Implicit in both these approaches was the need for different methods of social change. A propertyless society was seen as the product of a universal revolution, whist individualism eschewed revolutionary upheaval in favour of economic self-organisation and a change in individual consciousness through self-education and social evolution.’
Peter Ryley — Making Another World Possible.
4. Individualist anarchism seems to slope into libertarianism with its minimal state. The Anarchist view of trade, as expressed by Proudhon, is often associated with the more recent ideas of a ‘laissez-faire’ society and neo-liberal free markets. Ryley takes up the theme of self-interest and compares it to ‘greed is good’ consumerism. As Ryley points out, it is just a mistake to associate modern laissez-faire economics with anarchism, and especially with Proudhon. Ryley quotes from John Badcock:
‘The only way to escape from bondage is to deny all rights and privileges whatsoever. Look to self-interest direct for the attainment of your ends, and you will see that all the good things in life, all harmonious relationships you cling to, will be preserved because you like them.’
Ryley observes:
‘This may seem to mirror the amorality of the 1980’s ‘greed is good’ mentality, but the reality is that the individualist anarchists favoured the pursuit of self-interest in a society which was structured in such a way as to prevent exploitation, rather than one where it can be gratified through the intensification of exploitation, by gaining wealth at the expense of others. Self-interest is only u