Occupy and the direct action movements of today have much in common with the radical movements of the 1960s/70s. Both stress cultural as well as economic and political equality and insist on the possibilities of self-government. Can the new generation move beyond the successes and failures of the past, to develop an alternative political economy?
The ability of the Occupy movement to create platforms outside our closed political system to force open a debate on inequality, the taboo at the heart of the financial crisis, is impressive. It is a new source of political creativity from which we all have much to learn.
At the same time, no veteran of the movements of the late 1960s and 1970s can help but be struck by similarities. (I’m thinking here especially of the women’s movement which developed most practically and consistently the new thinking of these years about organising for political change). There’s the same strong sense of power from below that comes from the dependence of the powerful on those they dominate or exploit. There’s the creative combination of personal and collective change, and the bringing together of resistance with experiments in creating alternatives here and now. There’s the spurning of hierarchies and the creation of organisations that are today described as ‘horizontal’ or ‘networked’ – and that now with the new techno tools for networking have both more potential and more ambiguity.
And the same hoary problems reappear: informal and unaccountable leaderships, the tensions between inclusion and effectiveness. The Tyranny of Structurelessness, the 1970s pamphlet that tackled these unanticipated pitfalls from the perspective of the women’s liberation movement in particular, may be well read.
But that was 40 years ago – even before the widespread use of faxes, let alone personal computers and mobile phones! How could reflecting on these marginalised earlier movements possibly take forward the debates opened by Occupy and the Indignados?
From social rebellion to capitalist renewal
The fate of the energies and aspirations of that rebellious decade is a long and complex cluster of stories. To consider their relevance today, I want only to point to a historical process that was not generally anticipated at the time and still is not fully understood. This was the capacity of capitalism, as it searched for ways of out of stagnation and crisis, to feed opportunistically on the chaotic creativity and restless experimental culture of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
For example, from the 1980s, at the same time as the trade unions were under attack, management practices moved away from the military-style hierarchies characteristic of many leading companies. The cost of command management escalated, at least in the global North, in the face of an increasing educated and culturally sophisticated workforce (it wasn’t just students that listened to Bob Dylan!) Computer-based technologies opened up new possibilities and requirements. The result was a controlled decentralisation of production processes. As information increasingly became a component of production, in manufacturing as well as in culture, a new generation of managers recognised that workers’ practical knowledge could – through managed forms of collaboration, autonomy and participation – become a vital source of increased productivity and greater profits… so long as workers had little real power over their distribution.
At the same time, in the endless search for new markets, culturally-savvy marketing managers were able to identify and exploit the commercial opportunities in, for example, the expanded horizons and more sophisticated desires of the increasing numbers of women with incomes of their own.
The underlying trend is that much of the innovative character of capitalism’s renewal in the 1980s and 1990s – underpinned by the expansion of credit – came from sources external to both the corporation and the state. In fact, frequently its origins lay in resistance and the search for alternatives to both.
Capital thus proved very much more nimble in responding to – and appropriating – the new energies and aspirations stimulated by the critical movements of the 1960s and 1970s than did the parties of the left – for which these movements could have been a force for democratic renewal.
What kind of a counter-movement?
Now, with the credit that underpinned the apparent ebullience of this particular period of capitalism having become toxic, the search for alternatives is back. As I write, the Financial Times, much to its own astonishment, is publishing a week of articles on “The Crisis of Capitalism’. The opening article declares that “at the heart of the problem is widening inequality”.
Is the combination – not necessarily convergence – of unease within the cultural elites, with the growth of sustained popular resistance and public disgruntlement, producing what Karl Polanyi called a ‘counter-movement’ to the socially destructive consequences of rampant capitalism? And could awareness of the legacy of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s strengthen this possibility?
I am not asking the younger generation to root around in second-hand bookstores for texts and proposals that were around at the time. Rather it is a matter of being attentive to the ambivalence built into neo-liberal capitalism, formed in part through the ongoing marketisation of social aspirations and collaboratively creative values. And then identifying – and occupying – the ambiguous spaces and half opened cracks, in order to connect with the unpredictable kinds of agency that this ambivalence has shaped.
A fundamental break
To carry out such an inquiring kind of politics we need, briefly, to remind ourselves of the original social critique made by the 1960s/70s movements. In particular the nature of the attempted break with the institutions of the post-war order: their paternalism, their exclusions, their narrow definition of democracy and their assumption that production and technology were value neutral.
Central to the character of this critique was its aspiration, more in practice than in theory, to overcome the debilitating dichotomies of the cold war: between the individual and the collective/social; freedom and solidarity/equality; ‘free’ market versus ‘command’ state – dichotomies that were refrozen through neoliberalism and the manner of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The ideas and practices of the 60s/70s women’s movement are particularly illustrative. This movement was a response partly to the gender-blind inconsistencies and incompletely fulfilled promises of the radical movements of the time. It deepened and extended their innovations, adding insights arising from women’s specific experiences of breaking out of their subordination.
Especially important here was an insistence on the individual as social and the collective as based on relations between individuals: a social individualism and a relational view of society and social change. After all, the momentum of the women’s liberation movement was animated both by women’s desire to realise themselves as individuals and their determination to end the social relationships that blocked these possibilities. This required social solidarity: an organised movement.
The nature of its organisation was shaped by a constant attempt to create ways of organising that combined freedom an autonomy – what every woman struggles for in her own life – with solidarity, mutuality and values of equality. When it was successful (to cut a complex and tense story short) it developed ways of relating that both allowed for autonomy and also achieved co-ordination and mutual support, without going through a single centre. In other words, here was what could be called an early, pre-ICT, ‘networked’ form of organisation.
The political economy of networks
This networked form was distinctive because integral to its origin, character and sustainability were values of solidarity and equality and democracy. Today, the capacity of networks is radically enhanced through the new information and communications technology in its non-proprietorial forms. What both generations of activists share is a recognition of the importance for movements of democratic change of practical, experiential knowledge and the need to share and socialise it.
Awareness of these origins could help us now, when networked organisations are everywhere, to distinguish between the instrumental use of the concept of network in essentially undemocratic organisations (within states and corporations, for example) and, on the other hand, as a way of connecting distributed activities based on common values of social justice and democratically agreed norms.
Why is this important to the development of a political economy beyond capitalism? Behind the imposed choice between a capitalist market and the state is the polarisation between scientific, social and economic knowledge on the one hand and practical knowledge on the other. While the former was regarded as the basis of economic planning and centralised through the state, defenders of the free market held up the latter as being held individually by the entrepreneur and capable of coordination only through the haphazard workings of the market, based on private ownership. The relevant breakthrough of the women’s and other movements of the 1960s/70s was to make the sharing and socialising of experiential knowledge – in combination with scientific forms – fundamental to their purposeful, but always experimental, organisations.
The challenge in today’s information age is to translate this into economics in order to create and sustain a non-capitalist market. That is, a regulated, socialised market, in which the drive to accumulate and make money out of money is effectively suppressed. This would also provide a basis for democratising and, where appropriate, decentralising the state, within the framework of democratically agreed social goals (such as concerning equality and ecology).
It is over these issues that the ideas coming from the Occupy movement can creatively converge with those of earlier movements. It is not surprising, then, to read the economics working group of Occupy London describing in the Financial Times how Frederick von Hayek is “the talk of Occupy London”. No doubt this was partly a rhetorical device for the FT audience. But the challenge to Occupy can usefully be seen as that of answering the Austrian economist and theorist, who justified free-market capitalism with his ideas on the significance of distributed practical and/or experiential knowledge.
At first glance, there is much in common between Hayek’s critique of the ‘all knowing state’ and the critique of the social democratic state made by the libertarian/social movement left in the 1960s/70s. Both challenge the notion of scientific knowledge as the only basis for economic organisation and both emphasise the importance of practical/experiential knowledge and its ‘distributed’ character.
But whereas Hayek theorises this practical knowledge as inherently individual and hence points to the haphazard, unplanned and unplannable workings of the market and the price mechanism, the radicals of the 1960s/70s, as I have just explained, assumed that practical knowledge could be socialised and shared. This provided the basis for purposeful and therefore more or less plannable action – but action that was always experimental, never all-knowing. (For more on this, see my essay, Answering the Free Market Right.)
At the risk of being somewhat schematic, it could be argued that the movements of the 1960s/70s used these ideas to develop an unfinished vision of a democratised state. This took place both through attempts to create democratic, participatory ways of administering public institutions (universities and schools, for example) and through the development of non-state sources of democratic power (women’s centres, police monitoring projects and so on). It involved working ‘with/in and against’ the state, such as when the Greater London Council was led by Ken Livingstone in the early 1980s.
Today’s movements are focusing on challenging the oligarchic market, and the injustice of corporate and financial power. Today the development of networked forms is increasingly linked to distributed economic initiatives – co-ops, credit unions, open software networks, collaborative cultural projects and so on. In this way, today’s movements are beginning to develop in practice a vision of socialising production and finance and creating an alternative kind of market, complementary to the earlier unfinished vision of democratic public power.
What they have in common, more in practice than in theory, is an assertion of organised democratic civil society as an economic actor, both in the provision of public goods and in the sphere of market exchange.
Cultural equality
The architects of the welfare state and the post-war order, with all their achievements and limits, believed in economic and political reform. But they did so generally on the basis of assumptions of cultural superiority: they, the professionals, knew what was best for the masses. By contrast, the rebellions of the 1960s/70s were asserting cultural equality. Their goals concerned economic and social needs but in a context of challenging dominant understandings of knowledge, emphasising the public importance of practical, tacit and experiential knowledge. This underpinned a commitment to developing the organisations in the workplace and wider society that could share this knowledge and turn it into a source of transformative power.
It is in this thoroughgoing egalitarianism – not only of opportunity and outcome but also of potential – and its corollary of democracy in economics and culture as well as formal politics, that Raymond Williams’ work was a lodestone. So too the contribution of Edward Thompson. Essential to this egalitarian culture is a mutuality of theory and experience, which in the labour movement in England have all to often been counterposed. Williams and Thompson, both in their writing and their life, explored a creative dialectic between theory and experience, intellect and feeling (interestingly they both devoted a good part of their lives to adult education). This was evident in their collaborative political initiatives too: the new left clubs in the late 1950’s and early 60’s, the Convention of the Left in 1969 and latterly the Socialist Society in the early 1980’s – to which Red Pepper can trace its origins!
The broadly anti-capitalist movements born in the late 1990s are remaking that struggle for a thoroughgoing equality and an all encompassing vision of democracy. They are doing so in radically changed political and economic circumstances, framed by a new form of cultural domination. It is in effect the imposition of a financial accounting mentality. Thus, pensioners are defined as a ‘burden’; workers as ‘costs’. Higher education is a ‘personal investment’, as if everyone determined their future in terms of a personal rate of return rather than a contribution to society. The result is a culture of acquiescence to the cuts and privatisation in the interests of an unproblematised goal of ‘growth’.
How can we challenge these new forms of cultural subordination, turning citizens into mere ‘hands’ or ‘dependants’ in the language of 19th-century capitalism?
Alternative values in material practice
Part of the answer is surely to be discovered by illustrating in practice the alternative values that could found a political economy based on a framework of equality, mutuality and respect for nature. Many such illustrations are up and spreading: credit unions that organise finance as a commons; public sector workers countering privatisation with proposals for improving and democratising services for and with fellow citizens; ‘free culture’ networks insisting on the use of ICT as a means of extending and enriching the public sphere rather than a digital oilfield for profit; a revival of co-operatives and collective consumer action around energy, food and other spheres in which the logic of capital is particularly destructive to society and the environment. The strategic question we have to work on is how to generalise from, interconnect and extend these scattered developments.
In this sense the insistence on ‘being the change we want to see’ and creating alternatives here and now has a macro significance as well as a micro one. The exhaustion of the existing system is in some ways far deeper than in the 1960s and 1970s but we should never underestimate the ability of capital to adapt and appropriate – which is why we must think ambitiously, though remaining grounded, about our collective organisational innovations.
Finally, what about relations with the state?
Driving the steady development across the world of forms of social or, more radically, solidarity economics is an ambition to be part of a process of systemic change. This raises the question of how these initiatives relate to the state and to electoral politics.
Most activists in these experiments, rightly, have no faith in the ability of the political class to lead ways out of the crisis. But this has sometimes been associated with an overly-generalised theorisation of engagement with political institutions as necessarily counterposed to the building of non-capitalist economic relations. Experience, however, points to the possibility of a pragmatic and cautious engagement with political institutions from a consciously and determinedly autonomous base.
An example of this can be found in Argentina, where networks of workers’ co-ops have struggled for legislation favourable to their interests. For example, starting with support at a municipal and provincial level in Buenos Aires, they have won the legal right to maintain ownership and control of occupied factories. The logic of their approach has been to develop autonomous sources of power rooted in actual alternatives, rather than merely forms of pressure and protest that leave the creative initiative (or rather lack of it) with the political class.
This experience effectively illustrates the power of a creative, productive civil society.
In conclusion
It’s not easy to sum up what the managers of the ruling order felt so threatened by in the 1960s/70s, so let’s use the words they employed themselves. It was ‘an excess of democracy’ that lay behind ‘the reduction of authority’, concluded the Trilateral Commission when it investigated the causes of the political and economic crises of the early 1970s on behalf of governments of the dominant western powers. This was more than just the ruling class fear of the mob. The notion of ‘an excess of democracy’ implied a fear of intelligent and organised opposition, which was hence less easy to counter.
It was the autonomous and yet purposeful, organised and capable nature of the movements – including, perhaps especially, in the workplace – that they feared most. Here was the emergence of a new generation with allies throughout society that no longer accepted the place allotted to them by the elite democracy handed down to them after the war. And yet that generation comprised the children of the post-war democratic order, gaining legitimacy through appealing to its claims and its unfulfilled promises. At that moment, the elites lost their authority. Simple repression would no longer work – not that they didn’t try it.
Later on, as the ideas of the radical movements began to shape political debate in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the threat, at least in the UK, became that a form of socialism (or at least a viable political vision threatening to the elites) might emerge that could no longer be dismissed by reference to the failure of the Soviet model. Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand hatchet man, put it neatly in reference to the radically democratic Greater London Council of the early 1980s: “This is the modern socialism and we must destroy it.”
The grounds for these fears lay in the distinctive nature of those movements and projects as described in this article. In their ways of organising (combining autonomy and co-operation, creating the participatory conditions for the genuine sharing of knowledge), the alliances they built (across the traditional divides of economics, culture, labour and community) and their vision (beyond state versus market, individual versus social), they held out in practice the possibility of an alternative, participatory and co-operative political economy.
For a time, the new political culture seemed unstoppable. Now, in the presence of Occupy and the multiplicity of movements that share in new ways the same hopeful characteristics, it feels as if, like a mountain stream that disappeared from sight, the same excess of democracy, with its springs in the 1960s and 1970s, is bubbling up again.
In one sense the terrain into which it flows is more steeply rocky and bleak. The resistance that Williams predicted to the ‘rising determination that people should govern themselves’ sometimes seems insurmountable.
Yet on the other hand, new possibilities are opening up, as the foundations of capitalism’s legitimacy have become a site of self-demolition. Keynes described the precariousness of these foundations like this: “To convert the businessman into the profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism because it destroys the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards…The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.” The shift by owners of capital, from the early 1970’s onwards, from investing in production towards speculating in financial ‘products’, has meant that ‘businessmen’, in Keynes’ modest language, have become profiteers, big time. And the psychological equilibrium is shaking before our eyes.
At the same time the increased capacities and confidence of labour of all kinds has radically increased the curve of ‘people’s rising determination to govern themselves’ economically as well as politically.
In the 60s and 70s, we began to lay the foundations in democratic civil society of an alternative political economy – including a different kind of state. You could say we were rudely interrupted in our work. If we can recover what was potentially powerful and join with new generations with capacities and visions way beyond our own, we can collectively be stronger.
This owes much to recent discussions with Mark Barratt, Marco Berlinguer, Roy Bhaskar, Jacklyn Cock, Emma Hughes, Robin Murray, Doreen Massey, Sheila Rowbotham and Jane Shallice.
