The Leaderless Revolution

This article will forever disqualify me from govt service, thx @KatrinaNation!

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

Occupy Wall Street and a New Politics for a Disorderly World

Carne Ross | February 7, 2012

The global financial crisis has provoked a profound and necessary questioning of the prevailing political and economic orthodoxy. So pervasive is this disillusionment with the current order that it is hard to find anyone prepared to defend it. Disorder is the new order; disequilibrium rules, and old assumptions no longer hold.   As Kuhn’s theory might suggest, the rank contradictions of the current political-economic paradigm—gross inequality and massive environmental destruction—are so great that a new paradigm should emerge: a system of thought and method of political action that can address these ills, and indeed offer a better method of organizing and understanding human society.

As a diplomat in the British foreign service, I served deep inside one bastion of conventional politics—the world of international diplomacy. I helped propagate “top-down,” government-dominated politics across the world, including in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. I resigned because my government ignored available alternatives to violence and dissembled before the Iraq invasion (I had been Britain’s Iraq expert at the UN Security Council). This breach triggered a deeper questioning of the way things are done. I concluded that top-down management was not working and that conventional political models, including representative democracy, were producing not stability but its opposite, an increasingly fractured society at home and around the globe and a perilously vulnerable environment.

In my former career, I saw how governments attempt to enforce order on a world that resists their methods. But complex systems, such as a world of billions of dynamic connections, cannot be frozen as if on a chessboard, intelligible and susceptible to step-by-step command and control. Indeed, governments by their own admission are less and less able to control the massive, heterogeneous forces now making our world: dramatic economic transformation, mass migration and climatic change.

Worse, and this helps explain the failure, these attempts exclude the people most affected—ordinary people. It has become clear that even in our supposedly iconic democracies, government decisions do not reflect the needs of everyone but rather those who enjoy privileged access: large corporations, the superwealthy, the elites—the 1 percent who benefit from this disorder, like the speculators who play volatile markets, companies that profit from the absence of price on environmental destruction and the cynical politicians who exploit the growing anxiety and disaffection with crude and atavistic certainties.

* * *

A new politics is needed, and in the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street, I saw signs of its emergence. Some would see the Occupy protests as yet more evidence of disorder, not its solution. But to my jaded eye, the beacons pointing to a better method were bright indeed. At the UN Security Council and other diplomatic forums, I had taken part in high-stakes negotiations on everything from Iraqi WMDs to Palestine to the future of the Balkans. But the experience of hundreds of people listening to the voice of one—anyone!—through the “people’s mic” moved me more than any of those worldly negotiations. This was a politics of the many, included at last, at least in the small square of Zuccotti Park, if not in our distant capitals. Here I saw true respect, not the pretend respect of diplomacy. Here I saw involving and passionate debate, not the childish antagonism of Internet debate or the partisan rancor of Washington. The crowd was gripped by an unfamiliar emotion, a shared sentiment that others were listening and that their decisions truly mattered.

This is the start of a new politics, but obviously mere meetings and protest marches are not enough. There is nothing certain about the future, save that it is our actions that will create it and that others are already exploiting our inaction. It is no longer sufficient to appeal to government to put things right; a corrupted system will not reform itself. We must create new systems, new modes of decision-making and interaction, and new forms of economic behavior to replace the old.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrated some of the necessary elements of this new politics. Anyone who wished to participate could do so. All had a voice in decisions. These are the features of “participatory democracy,” which, when practiced more broadly, delivers outcomes unfamiliar from our own corrupted democracy: equality (because the interests of all are accounted for); transparency (and thus less corruption); and a civic culture of respect, not ugly partisanship.

This is a politics of the many for the many, rather than that of a small clique of elected representatives, co-opted by the powerful few. It requires patience and work, as the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park have learned. The consensus principle is vital, and prevents the “tyranny of the majority,” but it must (and can) be engineered to allow fast decisions and discussions of complex issues. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, mass participation in decision-making has succeeded in deliberating the affairs of a city, and the results clearly indicate more equal provision of services, better environmental protection and an improved political culture, one that is open, nonpartisan and uncorrupted.

Once decisions are made this way, they have immense force. Unlike with the distant machinations of government, all participants feel that they have been consulted. Everyone commits.

Participatory democracy should be promoted for every public setting, from our neighborhoods to our cities and counties. As turkeys will not vote for Thanksgiving, politicians are unlikely to institute such systems. Instead, we will have to set them up ourselves, starting local—our street, our building, our school—and in doing so establish legitimacy from the ground up, a legitimacy that today’s politicians evidently do not enjoy.

* * *

The second element is equally critical: this is the politics of the personal. Our political goals must be embodied in everything we do, for this is the most direct way to produce necessary and urgent change. Despite its perpetual encouragement by over-promising politicians, the habit of asking government to produce the ends we seek is out-of-date. Given the way that Washington (and indeed London or Paris) works, there is zero chance that any politician, even one with the best intentions, will deliver a just society, where the weakest are properly cared for and where the earth that sustains us is itself sustained.

Personal action is also the most effective means of influencing others. Forget Internet petitions, tweeting, writing to your Congressman or other formats of usually fruitless complaint—what you do will have the most persuasive force in encouraging others to do the same. Think of “the wave” in a sports stadium. This is the way to change a complex, highly interconnected system, not top-down management, as network theory and social research are demonstrating. And throughout, an older maxim carries an eternal message: the means are the ends, as Gandhi taught. If you use violence, you are likely to get violence. Like his famous Salt March (or Salt Satyagraha), the ideal political protest is the one that embodies the change you wish to see. Do it yourself, and nonviolently.

Self-organized, nonviolent action by the many, consulting all those affected: some would call these methods anarchism, but if so it is a very gentle kind. In fact, these techniques amount to a politics of modernity, of complexity, a politics most appropriate to our current state. These methods also inhere in a new economics, for Marx was in this sense correct: the economics makes the politics. You cannot have a fair, cohesive or happy society when a tiny few hold the vast bulk of the wealth and where companies are legally bound to maximize profits over all else, ignoring any un-costed effects to the environment or society.

There are forms of business that in their very design make up a better politics. Cooperatives share ownership among their staff as well as agency—that sense of control and participation that contemporary society denies us. As Britain’s massive retail giant John Lewis has shown, cooperative companies can be just as successful, and can endure much longer, than the merely profit-driven. “Triple bottom line” companies give equal weight to their social and environmental impacts alongside the profit line.

Such companies can be founded. They can be competitive. And we can support them by choosing them over more negligent businesses. In the OWS Alternative Banking working group, for example, we are building the elements of a new Occupy Bank [see Carne Ross, “Revolution Through Banking?” TheNation.com, December 22], which would be democratic, transparent and egalitarian, and would offer better services than for-profit banks.

* * *

Finally, it’s not just a better political system or a better economy that the new paradigm promises; it is also a richer aesthetics, a better culture. The ghastly homogenization and banality of consumer culture undermine our experience of life (this is perhaps the reason for the weird idol worship of the aberrational design fetishist Steve Jobs). The rabbit-hutch geography of the office combines with the humiliations of corporate culture (for bosses as much as the bossed-about) to alienate and demoralize everyone concerned. How we crave escape—pharmacological, alcoholic or virtual.

The current malaise is thus existential as well as political and economic. Nonetheless, this collective crisis can be captured in one word: agency. Control. We have lost it. We need to take it back.

The methods proposed here flow from an appreciation of society and the human project that differs fundamentally from the assumptions that underpin conventional neoclassical economics and representative democracy. The premise is that people are not merely self-serving but value other qualities—compassion, meaning, community, beauty—at least as much. That they can be trusted to run their own affairs, a trust that is repeatedly undermined in today’s fear-based culture. Hobbes’s “state of nature,” of war of all against all, is a bogeyman belied by real-life experience, which suggests that after disaster strikes, people facing common hardship collaborate without need for overweening authority, as Rebecca Solnit has eloquently written. Human nature is more beautiful than we have been led to believe.

But perhaps because the human is a rather subtle and undefinable beast, these methods, and this new understanding, may never make up a complete new system or structure, in theory or in practice. Marxism and neoclassical economics sought comprehensive explanatory systems of society and indeed of human behavior. Both in their ways proposed complete accounts of the human project, with all loose ends neatly tied off.

But if 1989 marked the end of communism, the global financial crisis and the insistent drumbeat of environmental disaster should mark the end of the political and economic orthodoxy that brought these perils about. The presumption of completeness inherent in both these thought-systems was their downfall because, inevitably, they left out crucial factors.

Marx failed to foresee that totalitarianism was an intrinsic risk of a self-appointed vanguard movement. The rationalist models of neoclassical economics failed to take account of the influence of irrational human behavior, like that witnessed in the credit bubble’s credulity, as well as the revealingly named “externalities” like social and environmental costs. Unpredicted and unmanaged economic volatility, mounting social fragmentation and grave environmental damage are now overwhelming the appealing but simplistic “internal” logic of equilibrium-seeking markets and utility-maximizing consumers.

Indeed, the pathetic human need for a complete explanatory system needs to be resisted, for no theory can offer a full account of a world that is already massively, and yet also increasingly, complex, where any event, from the destruction of a job to war, is the subject of countless factors, all in constant, dynamic interaction. We hunger for a detailed map of the world, but the best we can hope for is a general understanding of a new dispensation: complexity. And complexity does not demand management by authorities; it is instead best influenced by individual agents, acting by themselves at first, then with others, carrying the potential to affect the whole system.

This, then, is the new politics for a disorderly world. The defenders of the status quo claim that only their methods can maintain order. They are, in fact, achieving the opposite. The politics proposed here, and already evident in Occupy and elsewhere, can foment a deeper order, where people are connected to one another, reweaving our tattered social fabric, where work is fulfilling and responsible, and where everyone in society is given their proper voice and their interests are accounted for. Our current political and economic forms have made avowal of these ideals seem archaic, almost absurd. How ridiculous to wish for such virtues! We cannot let such cynicism triumph. A new way is possible, but it has to be enacted, not asked for.

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Down With Leadership

Posted: 02/ 2/2012 2:42 pm

The Republican primaries grind on. Now that Newt Gingrich has declared his determination to fight it out until the convention in August, the year's news "agenda" will be wholly dominated by the soap-opera arguments of the presidential contest. Though tediously drawn-out, the ritualized debates reveal little of how the successful candidate will really perform once in office. But one message comes through, unintentionally, loud and clear. Our political culture, and indeed society, is obsessed with the idea of "leadership." This obsession is not only demeaning (both to the candidates, and to us); it is profoundly dangerous.

Our culture fetishizes leadership. A thousand books extol the "leadership lessons" of tycoons and sportsmen. The leaders are wise; the rest are rendered impotent sheep. As the deification of the leader and his superhuman qualities reaches its orgiastic climax in the presidential election, it seems almost blasphemous to point out an awkward new reality. The king is shedding his clothes. Leadership, at least of the traditional political kind, is not working.

The nature of the world today is dramatically altered from the circumstance of only a few years ago. Globalization is spawning an immense and growing complexity, requiring new forms of management. It is simply impossible for any single authority to understand or arbitrate this maelstrom. Yet this omniscience is what we demand of our leaders.

Any event, from recession or war to the creation of a single job, is now the function of countless myriad and ever-changing factors. This always was the case, but now it is more so. Nevertheless, like children looking up at teacher, our infantile political culture requires the would-be leader to claim that they alone can make wise decisions to govern this extraordinary complexity. The gameshow format of the campaign debates (which tells its own story) only highlights the absurdity: "In 30 seconds, please tell us how you would save the economy?"

The evidence of the disastrous ineffectiveness of top-down "leader-led" management of the world is all around, should we care to see it. In the environment, climate change accelerates. In the economy, volatility mounts untrammeled by the confused and belated efforts of governments, forever behind the curve. In society, inequality and social tension are in parallel ascent.

Traditionally, and with easy resentment, we blame politicians and political parties for these failures. But the uncomfortable truth is they are not the problem. The problem is in fact us, for in our pathetic obeisance to the leadership cult we have abdicated not only our own responsibility, but, worse, our much greater power to deal with today's new world.

In a complex system, the most potent agent of change is not authority but the individual, and the group. The era of a world organized and dominated by states and their leaders is ending. No one will take their place in the director's chair. No single agency or leader will determine any particular event, or necessarily understand it. An era of leaderless change is upon us, where history will be written by the many, not the few.

This shift is buttressed by recent research in network theory: Complex systems resist centralized command-and-control, but individuals can trigger change across the system. Other research highlights another under-rated vector of change -- those with most influence upon the behavior of others are not government, not experts, but those right beside us: neighbors, family and peers.

Conventional assumptions about political power are thus overturned. It is action by individuals, and with others, which offers the most effect. As we realize the decline of the leader-based model, a new form of self-organized politics will emerge.

Rather than looking to distant authority for answers, individuals and groups will pursue change directly through their own behavior, for the means, as Gandhi taught, are the ends. To arbitrate our common business, people are starting to negotiate directly and horizontally. In cities around the world, participatory democracy, where all can take part in decision-making, is producing fairer, less corrupt and more sustainable outcomes. Decisions made through mass participation reflect the interests of everyone and not just those with privileged connection to the leadership.

Watching the trading of hollow slogans in the debates, we intuitively know that the leader-centric model is not working. Taking responsibility instead ourselves will demand more work. But action by us is not only more effective, it is also more fulfilling than the cynicism and frustration evoked by today's leader-obsessed political culture.

This Quantum Diaries blog is an excellent discussion of the virtues of logical positivism in science, namely the vital distinction between claims that can be tested against evidence, and those that cannot, or where the evidence does not exist.

However, logical positivism is a very dangerous framework for the study of human affairs.  This is one of the fundamental assumptions of the thinking behind "The Leaderless Revolution".  Human society comprises many elements, including economic transactions, and other measurable features.  These measurable elements are however not the whole picture, by any means.  And what cannot be measured may be the most important of all.  These elements include things like compassion, love, hate and our existential sense of being, including our relationship with "Nature".  There may be some psychological tests that can crudely put numbers to these features of the human experience, but I suspect that even their most ardent proponents would not claim these measurements comprise a complete account.

Despite this grave reservation, this is nonetheless the claim of the neoclassical mainstream discourse of economics.  It does offer, both in its statistics and aesthetics (neat graphs, defined relationships, equations) it offers a compelling and attractive explanation of "what is going on".  The school of "Freakonomics" etc attempts to put economic explanation to many contemporary phenomena, suggesting that "economics" can explain more or less everything.

This tendency in mainstream economics, which is now expanding to include discourses like "behavioural economics", is of course well recognised more broadly in the mis-named "social sciences".  It is not however recognised in our broader culture.  The claims of this very limited form of analysis are perpetrated as eternal provable truths of both individual and business behaviour ("micro-economics") and the economy and thus society as a whole (macro).  The reason that these claims are rarely challenged in public debate is of course that these claims suit the plutocracy, for whom neo-classical economics serves as a very convenient quasi-scientific platform for their more hidden and implicit project of economic exploitation, both of ordinary people and the environment.  Notably, mainstream economics continues to ignore the pricing of both "social costs" (which in my view are unpriceable in meaningful terms, precisely because they are unmeasurable) and envirnonmental "externalities") (likewise unpriceable, but to a lesser extent).

I tweeted about this yesterday.

Looking back at the upheaval of 1968, it's all too clear that the ideals of that short moment were appropriated by the mainstream and thus nullified.  As Slavoj Zizek has observed, Che Guavara became a T-shirt logo rather than a global revolution.  The words and slogans of the movement (which, like Occupy, was tellingly diffuse) became part of mainstream commercial culture, where their repetition and misplacement gutted them of any political meaning and, above all, effect.

When crockery shops advertise their wares as "gifts for the 99%", the extraordinary impact of Occupy is evident, but also, sub-textually, the profound risks to its message and impact.  More dangerous still is when the likes of Newt Gingrich and other Republican contenders rivalling the uber-capitalist Mitt Romney use Occupy-type language to criticize his slash-and-burn allegedly job-killing methods at Bain Capital.

We all know that if President, none of these candidates will do the slightest thing to modulate the egregious environmental and social impacts of corporate crony capitalism of the ilk that is so dominant today.  Rather the opposite.  Yet these candidates shamelessly appropriate the language of Occupy to curry favour with a deeply disenchanted public.  Basta!

To celebrate the ideas of "The Leaderless Revolution", I'd be really grateful for suggestions of individuals around the world who are taking action to affect political and economic circumstances directly, not by campaigning or politicking but by doing - the essence of the philosophy of the book. 

Whether establishing forums of participatory democracy, cooperatives, new banks or using other methods to bring economic and political justice by direct means, these are the individuals demonstrating the new form of politics which brings real results, in contrast to the sclerosis and corruption of an ailing government-centric mode of politics.

I am trying to understand why I have always found new year's eve a dismal affair.  This morning, for some reason, I am in the mood to break this down.

The manufactured celebration affirms our false understanding of time, that it is all about what is past and what lies ahead, when in fact life is "about" neither.  Neither past nor future exists.  There is of course only the present.  

Increasingly, I can only interpret any event or idea politically.  And new year's eve is no exception.  Almost all politics is about the future, an endlessly recycled promise of better times.  Witness the ghastly rhetoric of the Republican primaries.  The only other political narrative is blame for the past or, less often, the present.  Almost no discussion is devoted to the experience of the here and now.

This is what a new kind of politics means to me.  Instead of the repetitive and often hollow conjuring of a better tomorrow, politics should be about us, here, now (this is one reason why anarchist thought is often associated with atheism, which similarly rejects the false promise of heaven).  Materialism and indeed capitalism relies upon the creation and repetition of currently unsatisfied desires, which are briefly satiated by the act of consumption.  For it is consumption, as we are often told, that drives the economy.

Thus, the current economic set-up requires an unrelenting focus on the future, and not the present: what we might enjoy, rather than what we have today.  It takes little analysis of course to recognise that under the surface, the other requirement is the constant promotion of dissatisfaction with the present.  Advertising must reinforce this.  Things will be better if you purchase this product.

Thus, the false celebration of new year's eve is the most obvious marker of an economic and political culture which relies upon us ignoring the most important experience of life: what is now.  In its place, we are asked to remind ourselves of the disappointments of the past and the hope of the future, which likewise will be ultimately unfulfilled too.  We must turn a new leaf!

Near the end of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, there is an extraordinary passage:

“Perhaps later, much later, the new movement would arise- with new flags, a new spirit knowing of both: of economic fatality and the ‘oceanic sense’.  Perhaps the members of the new party will wear monks’ cowls, and preach that only purity of means can justify the ends.  Perhaps they will teach that the tenet is wrong which says that a man is the product of one millions divided by one million, and will introduced a new kind of arithmetic based on multiplication, on the joining of a million individuals to form a new entity which, no longer an amorphous mass, will develop a consciousness and an individuality of its own, with an ‘oceanic feeling’ increased a millionfold, in unlimited by self-contained space.”

These are the final thoughts of Rubashov, the central character of the novel, as he contemplates his imminent execution at the hands of his erstwhile comrades in the Communist Party.  Rubashov asks himself what has happened to this rationalist system, communism, that it will use such brutal and oppressive means to attain its just society.  He realizes the mistake in the system is in the precept, the ends justifies the means:

“It was this sentence that had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them all run amuck.  What had he once written in his diary? ‘We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logica; we are sailing without ethical ballast’.”

Rubashov ends up hoping for a movement that encompasses the irrational (his ‘oceanic sense’) as much as the rational and the logical, treating humans as more than mere numbers.  Notably, it is not a system or structure that he wistfully imagines, but a “movement”.  

Koestler's scepticism of any science-based, rationalist system must surely apply not only to communism, but our own current rationalist dispensation.  And here too we witness the ultimate destructiveness of a doctrine of ends (material wellbeing) justifying more subtle, less brutal, but nonetheless poisonous, means (inequality, the devastation of nature, and the ghastly emptiness of modern work).