MIA > Archive > Kidron > Presence of Future
It is ominous when a civilization predicated on economic growth loses its impetus, as ours has done since its heroic days in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The causes run deep, external as when growth collides with the civilization’s inherited constraints (‘environment’ and ‘human nature’), and internal (when it veers away from society’s deepest interests, and loses its power to preserve order, cognitive and moral).
It is as ominous when a civilization based on the coherence and sovereignty of its individual members experiences a widespread sundering of the self.
Our civilization suffers from both. Its expansion is getting slower, and its members are losing the confidence, personal integrity, and self-assurance that go with them.
There is a smell of decay about. There is also a justified fear that the decay will be punctuated by paroxysms of such intensity that many of the world’s people might be consumed and the pillars of life put at risk.
These are unhappy times, and solutions are not knocking at the door. Of those proffering an escape, the socialist revolutionaries seem to forget that the weight of their traditional constituency in the labour force – industrial workers – is declining, and that its concentration in large, solidarity-forcing units is falling even faster. The Greens have no clear constituency, have little record as agents of change, and are easily corrupted by the norms of mainstream politics. There are few others who can pretend to offer a vision of an alternative civilization, let alone a road-map to it.
Yet the goal is clear: a civilization in which sharing, not competitive struggle, is the ruling ethos – between humans, and with other forms of life.
Such a civilization is not about to form of itself, nor will its birth be painless.
The consolidation of industrial market society was brutal in the extreme. Whole peoples were exterminated. Millions were killed, millions more died in the attendant upheavals and famines, other millions were uprooted and relocated, and millions had their traditional way of life shattered in the frightening run-up to industrialization. The human cost of fundamental change was heavy.
It is unrealistic to expect so profound a shift as that from market society to ecological society to be easier or less violent. If anything the converse will hold. Both are global in extent, dependent on the same pool of resources. Where before, the defeated mode of living could retreat before its successor – as did the foragers before the agrarians – or co-exist with it – as did, until recently, agrarian society with market society, that option is no longer available. There are no interstices in market society in which ecological society can develop, as there were for the first farming and herding communities in hunter-gatherer days, or for early merchant capitalists and the later industrial capitalists within agrarian society. The need is for total replacement – or nothing.
More than in any other fundamental social transition, the danger is that the intricate web of social, attitudinal, technical and economic connections which form global society will unravel as paradigmatic discordance turns into practical contention for the same resources. The stakes are high, higher than they have ever been. There is no longer a choice between civilization and barbarism as there was deemed to be in the writings of the early socialists. The choice is between ecological society and none at all.
The shift will come about, if at all, only when the people tap into their collective consciousness and conclude decisively that life cannot continue without a fundamental change in our attitudes, behaviour and social arrangements.
Here, I want to stress the importance of ideas, and of consciousness for the shift, and draw some political/activist conclusions.
The ecological idea is indestructible.
Ideas can be shared. The more they are shared the faster they evolve; and even faster when they accumulate from generation to generation, fixed in language and other contrivances of human culture.
The evolution of the idea has followed a trend without major reversals. Ideas have become more general: localized patterns were incorporated in larger ones; occurrences became correlations embedded in regularities or laws; observed patterns were enfolded in implicate orders. They have come to deal with change: causality emerged from concatenation; probability from inevitability or determination; evolution from revelation; time past and future from time present. Ideas have become more abstract, and more introspective, more aware of themselves: logic, reasoning, explicitness and theory have augmented association, intuition, implicitness and practice as ever-lengthening chains of deduction flourish alongside the time-honoured modes of induction and immediacy. Above all, and this most recently, ideas have moved away from being depictors of reality to being active designers of reality; from being modelled on, to being modellers of, reality. They have lost their ‘virtual’ status and become fully part of reality. It was, after all, relativity theory and quantum physics that led to the atom bomb, not the other way around.
The evolution of ideas has reached breakneck speed in the latest phase of market society, reflecting the wildly increasing speed of change in the system, itself responding to the changes and increasing presence of the ideas which form part of it. This is a self-feeding process: abstract ideas are more fluid and more capable of change than ideas embedded in concrete experience. At the same time they are more easily diffused, more able to affect their context, to which they in turn respond more quickly and sensitively.
Changes in ideas are becoming larger and more frequent with every day. Paradigm changes take over from detailed, narrow changes with ever-growing frequency.
The increasing presence of ideas in market society owes much to the ever-growing individual differentiation within it, which makes connectedness based on common experience more difficult and puts a premium on shared ideas and attitudes, more fluid than experience and more able to embrace eccentricity, irregularity, heterogeneity.
In order to function effectively in modern conditions ideas need to satisfy certain conditions. They have to be abstract, to transcend location in keeping with the emergence of a global society; and to transcend specialization – be assimilable by large numbers who do not share experience of job, of place, of lifestyle, of purposive education, of language.
In order to exist in a world of unprecedentedly rapid cognitive change, they must be evolutionary, historical, narrative, embracing process as well as result, blurring the distinctions between them, and seeing structures as evanescent moments in movement.
They also have to reverse the conventional view that balance is a fleeting occurrence within growth, and turn it round to the view that growth serves balance; to strike a dynamic accommodation between powerful specialist ideas, each of which, on its own, would be driven to destroy human society and much of its habitat.
And they have to turn upside down the inherited, conventional view that harmony is a moment in competition, and connectedness something that might occasionally be rescued from separateness, to see competition as a moment in harmony, and separateness a phase in connectedness.
Ecological thinking marks the most recent development in the evolution of the idea. It starts from a simple premise that if a productive system and an ecosystem do not fit the one will destroy the other. At its heart is the notion of sustainability – the ability to maintain a dynamic symbiosis between the productive system and external nature or, phrased more cautiously, the ability to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising future generations’ ability to meet theirs. And at the heart of sustainability is the notion of stewardship, the duty to act as custodians or trustees for future generations and for all other orders of creation – to behave like responsible tenants of the globe in its entirety.
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‘We do not inherit the world from our parents, we borrow it from our children’ Green adage |
Time was when stewardship had a religious tinge: it was not for us to destroy or damage God’s creation. Later, with the ascendancy of utilitarian thinking it came to be understood as the protection of human interests by preventing the wanton depletion and degradation of usable resources. Today, although the earlier notions continue to exist, stewardship has come increasingly to be cast in terms of the interest of nature itself, rather than those of God or humanity. Nature is now taken to have an intrinsic, independent worth.
Stewardship entails careful accounting of the interchange between humans and external nature. Every effort should be made to lessen the human impact on environmental resources (materials, space, clean air, fresh water) and services (maintenance of temperature or the chemical composition of air and the oceans) whether by parsimony in use or by creating a self-contained industrial ecosystem in which the effluent of one process serves as the raw material for others.
Central to such accountancy is a shift from non-renewable fossil fuels to direct and indirect solar energy, the planet’s main energy source for billions of years and one to which life in its myriad forms has become exquisitely adapted. The array of possible techniques is endless – from direct trapping of sunlight to the production of methane from biomass, including much that is currently polluting the environment (rubbish, sewage, underwater sludge, crop and animal residues).
None of this rules out economic growth. The issue is not how much economic growth but of what kind. In general terms, production should be undertaken with means calibrated to the ends envisaged; we don’t need to ‘cut butter with a chainsaw’. The appropriate technology should be intermediate between that used in mass production – capital and energy intensive, inherently violent, ecologically damaging, prodigal in its use of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human personality – and the primitive technology of bygone ages. It should be conducive to decentralization, sparing in its use of scarce resources and designed to provide the producer with a tool instead of making him or her the servant of the machine. The currently dominant ideology which sees all problems, whether of nature, human nature, or culture, as ‘technical’ problems capable of rational solution through the accumulation of objective knowledge whose value is to be judged by how well they fulfil their appointed ends, is rejected in favour of infusing means with the ends to which they are directed.
The technology should also face inwards to human society. It should be usable and controllable at a neighbourhood level, and so encourage further economic autonomy for local and regional collectivities; and it should be compatible with the exercise of joint control by producers and consumers over products and production processes.
Effective stewardship implies a society which values commonality above comparison, a shift from the present culture which considers individual distinctiveness as superior to what is shared, from one which believes that that which is good for everybody is without value, to one which believes that the only things worthy of each are those which are good for all, and the only things worth producing are those which neither privilege nor diminish anyone.
Such an ethic shares with the liberal project an emphasis on plurality and tolerance. But it reaches beyond their weakness as a basis for concepts like justice and good, and situates them in a wider, non-relativist, non-individualist frame – ecological soundness. Behaviour is right or wrong irrespective of the private reasons for that behaviour. There is an objective measure – sustainability – which could be reflected by giving Nature legal status.
Self-evidently beneficial though these guiding principles are, even if they are not fully elaborated, ecological society must have mechanisms to enforce them – against the recalcitrant, the rebellious, the temperamentally ill-disposed. But the political function will not be exercised in the form of the state as we know it today – a Fractal State, a child of the global market and a paradox at odds with the Global corporations – with its appurtenances of military power, armaments and hierarchies. In so far as a state has a part to play in the ecological program – and that is not far – it is a world state acting as facilitator, adjudicator, monitor and consensus builder.
The overarching shared ecological ethic places severe constraints on that state. Governance is necessary: the rule of law has to be vindicated; injustice and unwarranted suffering must be dealt with; generosity exercised; and liberty defended. But the current state and current politics as a professional, specialist preoccupation of whatever hue – liberal, conservative, radical or “socialist” – will be rejected.
Ecological citizenship centres on the idea of direct, participatory democracy, the full expression of individual wishes weighted by an open community evaluation of the force and legitimacy of those wishes, on a scale at which individuals can make a difference. It favours the dispersal of authority, and encourages variety in its forms. It nurtures multi-tiered structures in which power to decide and to implement are fused (the very opposite of market society’s democratic ideal in which there is a separation and rivalry between the legislative, the executive, and the judicial arms of government). It calls for more people to have more say over more of what happens to them. That requires the elimination of all manner of formal barriers to participation. It requires arrangements to make effective the legal right to participate. And it requires that people feel their participation makes a real difference to their lives or the lives of the people or creatures they are interested in.
Market society is colliding ever-more insistently with the boundaries, flexible as they are, of human nature as we know it. Market Being is confused, with a damaged sense of self and ragged connectedness with others. Market Being is ill, uncertain, stressed, inadequate and in need of comfort. The new society and the new ethics will need a new exemplar – Ecological Being – who reintegrates in the individual the institutionalized, public functions which act as part-compensation for the psychic losses within market society. Ecological Being will make a conscious effort to secure emotional stability despite increasing personal mobility; and to satisfy the need for belonging to, and participating in, something larger than oneself, which nonetheless lends one significance.
Such a balanced, productive and unalienated being relates to the world lovingly, uses reason to grasp reality objectively, experiences self as a unique individual and, at the same time, feels at one with all others, rejects irrational authority but accepts the authority of conscience and reason. Such a Being is in the process of being born throughout its life. It does not have to live uneasily in two worlds at once, one of which, the social construct, governing our public life and relationships, runs counter to the other governing our personal, intimate lives and relating to our most basic instincts.
Such a Being is accountable not in the restricted sense of the heroic age but in an extension of it. I am answerable for doing or failing to do what anyone in my position owes to others, and this accountability ends only with death. It is to, for and with specific individuals that I must do what I ought, and it is to the same and other individuals, members of the same community, global in this case, that I am accountable.
Communities, in this view, cannot be reduced to individuals, individuals to cells, cells to genes. Ecosystems cannot be reduced to the organisms and the inanimate matter which make them up. Systems themselves stack into larger systems with characteristics other than their own or those of their component systems.
In this view the economy is a living system composed of human beings and social organizations in constant interaction with each other and with the surrounding ecosystem, and the ecosystem is a complex web of relationships in which animals, plants, micro-organisms and inanimate substances are all interlinked and interdependent, a network of processes involving the exchange of matter and energy in continual cycles. In this view, there is an optimal size for every structure, organization and institution. Untrammelled growth of any one will inevitably destroy the larger system of which it is part.
Ecological thinking is osmotic, conscious of the mutual infusion of all parts of reality. It is conscious of the limitations of language and concepts whose purpose, and whose positive value, is to interrupt the continuum of experience at certain points for particular reasons that have little or nothing to do with reality itself. Such thinking includes but also goes beyond the rational, the conceptual; includes differentiation but also transcends it to encompass similarity. It breaks with dialectic, Manichean thinking in opposites, absolute in themselves, and sees these as provisional distinctions of inseparable terms belonging to one underlying unity, distinctions that are justified, however, by the increase in consciousness and the expansion of life they make available.
This is a narrative view of reality, one which conflates before and after in a non-causal continuum, which sees the past and the future in the present. All events are interconnected, but the connections are not necessarily causal in the classic sense. It is a holonomic, fractal view of nature – the idea that a universal property of nature is that the whole is somehow represented in each of its parts.
It is a modern version of the utopian thinking, which has been with us in one form or another from time immemorial, and which has always acted to educate desire and sharpen purpose.
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A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man, 1891 |
Ecological ideas imply a shift in value from self-assertion and competition to cooperation and social justice, from expansion to conservation, from material acquisition to self-nurturing, from linear growth to balance, from distinction or differentiation to decentralization; from ‘think locally and act globally’, to ‘think globally and act locally’; from hard technologies to soft ones – renewable energy sources, solar energy collectors, wind generators, not fossil fuels; organic not chemical farming; regional and local food production and processing not global; re-use rather than ‘mine, make and dump’.
It is a view of nature as being essentially an arena for cooperation, mutual integration, therefore gentleness and harmony, in which competition for survival is one aspect of mutual accommodation and overall negotiation. In this it reflects a new consciousness of the limits to global resources and therefore the need to manage what there is. It is a view of health which stresses improvement, if not perfectibility, through conscious effort and releasing the benign natural predispositions of the human body, and disdains the view that we are stuck with disease and morbidity; a view that entails a clear definition of the individual and that behaviour can be changed consciously through the exercise of will. In this it reflects – ironically – the optimism of the hard sciences.
Ecological thinking breaks with entropy as a universal physical principle – the view that all systems degrade and become disorganized – and with the accompanying economic law of diminishing returns, which sets limits to effort. It sees the possibility of infinite progress based on an exponential growth of culture, the refinement of the spirit and the imagination, and the conscious evolution of the human and environmental apparatuses to support them – a new era of conscious co-development, a transition from human parasitism on the rest of nature to a symbiosis between humans and all other reality. It prefigures a transition from adaptation to intention; and an era that synthesizes the two earlier periods, when humans adapted to ‘nature’, and when humans forced ‘nature’ to adapt to human nature, in a new mutuality of adaptation.
Ecological thinking breaks with linear thinking – the idea that if something is good, more of it is better. It replaces that with the ideas of dynamic balance and appropriate size, with the notion that there is an optimum size for every structure, every organization or institution, and that maximizing any one of its components will ultimately destroy the larger whole.
Ecological thinking entails a shift in emphasis from means to purposes; a shift away from economic growth towards human development; from quantitative to qualitative values and goals; from the impersonal and organizational towards the personal and interpersonal; from the earning and spending of money towards the meeting of real needs and aspirations. It steers away from the aggressive and domineering, to the cooperative and supportive; away from exalting an undifferentiated ‘European’ culture to the valuing of multicultural richness and the diversity of human experience; away from an anthropocentric world view to one in which people form an integral part of an ecosystem, much larger, more complex and more powerful than ourselves. It involves a shift in thinking from the analytical, discovering mode, to the synthetic and creative.
The new paradigm emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of all phenomena, and the embeddedness of individuals and societies in the wider, ever-changing processes of nature.
It sees nature as an interconnected dynamic network of relatively stable relationships that include the human observer as an integral component. In it natural phenomena are described in terms of a web of concepts in which no one part is more fundamental than any other. And it advocates the shift from an attitude of domination over nature, including human beings, to one of cooperation and non-violence.
Such thinking is scarcely universal as yet. We still live for the most part with the mechanistic paradigm that promoted, and flourished in, market society – the world defined by Descartes, Newton, Bacon. But it is growing.
The evolution of consciousness lies at the heart of progress, the idea that human development or history does not go back on its tracks, that if there are cycles in the affairs of people, they fluctuate along a non-recurrent line. History in this view is not only a succession of different civilizations and levels of material accomplishment but more importantly a succession of different levels of consciousness, each of which forms part of a reality that includes ourselves as well as the objects of our attention.
At a certain level of development, consciousness itself can be designed. According to proponents of ‘hard’ artificial intelligence, computers are already well down the road to full self-consciousness. Ultimately they will take over, and the carbon-based evolution of consciousness which we have experienced until now will be succeeded by a silicon-based one. A rudimentary form of manufactured consciousness already exists in smart or designer materials – plastics which increase in thickness as they stretch, shapes that change at given temperatures, photosensitive glass, and so on.
Conscious evolution can take two routes neither of which is exclusive. We can design human consciousness, the awareness of awareness, so that people will ultimately have a feel for, or the experience of space-time for example; or we can develop the cultural apparatus that will obviate the need to select for that capacity, by developing a simpler mathematics and an apparatus that can translate space-time into the experiential dimensions we are used to. We can, as it were, breed for perceiving ultraviolet light and so add a fourth colour to our primary-colour palette, or refine the instruments we possess to translate reality into experience. In the largest sense we can plan progress.
The conditions for progress today are different to what they have ever been. A world society is forming. Incipient as yet, unevenly underpinned by worldwide institutions, and fitfully represented in human consciousness, let alone behaviour, it is nonetheless strong enough and widespread enough to put an end to cultural-selection-by-replacement. True, there are local variants of market society – Japan is not the US, nor is Germany Italy – but they are not autonomous variants, developing independently of one another, able to displace each other when conditions change in their common environment. They are too interconnected for that. Progress is now fully bound in with the destiny of humans. Progress, meaning cumulative, self-reinforcing change, far from being one possible pattern of human history, contending with others such as cyclical, regressive or even contingent motion, has edged out all other options. Cumulative change has become internalized in society, not something that occurs to it; has become the constant, unwavering condition of the human species. All of which means that cultural selection is going the way of natural selection as the germ of progress.
Like any society, the emerging global society can be defined by the extent and pattern of its internal communications. The wider and denser this web, the more integrated is the society. Today, this network of communication reaches the remotest crevices of the world – few places are free of a regular postal service; of telephones; or of radio, television and internet services. There is no corner of the earth that cannot be reached physically in one form of transport or another.
Naturally, the density of the network differs from place to place. Billions of electronic messages jostle America’s corporate desks each day. The number of bytes of information carried between London and New York in any one day – in letters, in parcels, in telephone impulses, in TV images, in radio waves and cyberspace – is measured in trillions. The traffic of people between them is likewise enormous. The same holds, more or less, for the major cities of the world – lay-bys on a global highway on which traffic never stops.
The denser the communications network the faster is the transmission of information and experience, and the faster the pace of change. It took 200,000 years for news of the existence of homo sapiens to spread through most of the world – an average speed of perhaps 100 metres a year. Communication in agrarian society speeded up mightily: it took, say, 9.5–10 millennia for the new mode of living to penetrate most of the inhabited globe – an average speed of two kilometres a year, or 20 times faster. It was still slow, limited by the speed a person or animal could walk (or, at best, run) or a ship could sail. As late as 1789, news of the storming of the Bastille took days to reach areas outside Paris, in a country with a road network unusually well-developed for its time. Today of course, distance does not exist, at least in the global urban network; news is instantaneous.
The increasing speed of communication both promotes and reflects the acceleration of social change and all the other changes, circumstantial-environmental, and personal-psychological, linked to it. If, at the dawn of human history, the infinitesimal, imperceptible changes that did, in fact, occur in society, outpaced the capacity for adaptation through natural selection, and were necessarily replaced by adaptation through cultural selection, today even that form of adaptation is too slow. In the circumstances, cultural selection must give way to another evolutionary mechanism – conscious selection. This implies an enormously enhanced role for consciousness, a facility to view one’s actions and motivations objectively, as part of a larger configuration.
With the dawn of conscious selection, human potential is poised to escape all bounds. The confines of necessity, if not lifted altogether, are widened to an extent at present unimaginable. The realm of freedom, with all the terrors that it holds for slaves of destiny that we still are, becomes attainable. Indeed, in the period of conscious selection freedom becomes a necessity.
Conscious selection implies the construction of nature – all nature, human and not. It implies a total, all-embracing view of that nature; a confluence of the two tides of selection we have known so far – seeking a niche in our non-human environment, and adapting that environment to our supposedly unchanging nature – into a single mutual co-evolutionary adaptation of our species and its surrounds.
Although a program for conscious evolution has not yet been formulated, discussion of what we would like to achieve is in its infancy, and organized, coherent consideration about the means to achieve what might be agreed, non-existent, many of the conceptual tools for that construction, and some of the physical ones, already exist in rudimentary form, elaborated for different, often contradictory purposes, often to head off and control developments, rather than facilitate them. The developments themselves present a picture of chaos, but so it must have seemed to early homo sapiens, wrestling with the transition from grunts to speech, the extension of hands into tools, or the first stirrings of contemplation.
Evolution is on the brink of another phase change, from cultural selection to conscious selection or directed cultural selection, where human choice determines developments in the human and the natural worlds, where human consciousness, the ultimate product of evolution in all its forms until now, acts for the whole of nature, and itself lifts off into as-yet-unexampled heights and unexplored realms. In this stage of evolution cause replaces result as the material of history; purpose replaces coincidence and accident.
The idea of conscious evolution as an attainable goal for humankind has a long and venerable pedigree.
It formed the living germ of the optimism that suffused the socialist movement in its early days.
‘Wealth’, wrote Marx in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formulations (1857–58), is at base, below the temporary corruptions of capitalist society, nothing more than ‘the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange ... [It is] the full development of human control over the forces of nature – those of his own nature as well as those of so-called ‘nature’ ... [It is] the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution – i.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardsticks – an end in itself ... [It is] a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality ... Where he does not seek to remain something formed in the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming’.
Until comparatively recently the idea of conscious or directed evolution, or conscious ‘unnatural’ selection remained just that, an idea, a wish. To be sure, it lay at the base of all technical advances from the design of stone tools to the domestication of crops and selective breeding for thousands of years. It has emerged, from time to time, as proposals, sometimes acted upon, sometimes left in the air as a programmatic provocation, to breed humans – as amongst slave-owners in the American south; or in the eugenics movement that swept through Europe and the US in the 1920s, which advocated at its best that ‘what nature does blindly and ruthlessly, man may do providentially, quickly and kindly’, and which inspired experiments in the improvement of humanity that ranged from setting up colonies of ‘perfect’ specimens, such as the people chosen in Saxony sent to Nueva Germania in Paraguay in the 1880s, to the attempted elimination of Jews and other undesirables in the Nazi extermination camps during the Second World War. But it lacked a driving operational concept and an effective technology. Now the ideas of designed genetic and neurological change and environmental engineering (which encompasses social, cultural and physical circumstances) are becoming a commonplace of intellectual speculation.
Armed with a mature, true consciousness, a consciousness conscious of itself and of all its relationships and their ramifications, there appears to be no limits to our choice of destiny. We can, in principle, do anything, go anywhere, be anything.
In such a universe of choice we shall be free to adapt our circumstances to our natures and our nature to our circumstances; free to choose, from all possible choices, that which increases ordered relational holism in the worlds we make; free, in other words, to dissolve the divide that evolved in the period of pre-global society, between human nature and ‘natural’ nature; free to renounce our claim to exclusive possession of that astonishingly creative and powerful tool, consciousness, the outcome of three and a half billion years of earthly evolution, and who knows how many years of evolution as such; free to cast ourselves as trustees for consciousness as such, nature’s consciousness.
The potentialities of consciousness and with it of human nature, of nature itself, in this third, impending phase in the evolution of evolution, are unimaginable in extent. They point to an unbelievable explosion in human adaptability, to an amplification of human potential awesome in its power.
How that power will be exercised, or whether it will be exercised at all, is, in our days, a deeply political matter. What to choose – the content of education, the limits on genetic and neurological tampering, the complementary and mutually-reinforcing changes in the social and material environment – forms the substance of bitter struggles between different layers and sections of society over the identity of the choosers and control over what is chosen. It is a struggle over the extent and content of democracy; over the extent of the moral community. The current strength and future development of consciousness, far from being a diversion from politics, is central to it now and in prospect.
Those who collide with the ruling pattern of rights and results are of two sorts – the rebels and the dissidents. In our day the rebels power grassroots movements of political protest, like those that toppled the party dictatorships in the Soviet empire in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, or the personal dictatorships such as Suharto’s in the late ’90s; and put the muscle into mass ecological and environmental movements in defence of forests in India, Sarawak, Malaysia, Ecuador, the Philippines, in defence of Mangroves in Côte d’Ivoire, reef systems in Belize, wildlife in Namibia, coastal fisheries in India, West Africa and the US west coast, women’s rights in countries as diverse as Pakistan and Japan; and much besides.
The dissidents are less overtly political but more numerous. They come from amongst those who deal with society’s inconsistencies and paradoxes – between profession and practice, appearance and reality, public pretence and private conduct, norms and incident.
They are the teachers who shape perceived reality; smooth it over; order it into some sort of coherence. They are the ideologues, formulating, adjusting, adapting, refurbishing, interpreting conventional wisdoms; and the communicators disseminating the results: the journalists in all media, the advertising and public relations people, those who work as market researchers, social researchers and opinion pollsters. They are the jurists, lawyers and the bureaucrats, even the police, social workers, counsellors and therapists, who enforce or coax obedience to society’s norms in practice. They are the artists and writers who make sense, or nonsense, of our experiences, who create order out of chaos (or vice versa). They are the children of these problem-solvers exposed to their perplexities. And they are the students, the aspirant dealers in paradox.
These are the knowledge classes. They do not constitute a majority, not even in the heartlands of the market system, but they add up to a surprisingly large number – millions in the US, millions in Europe, millions in Japan, untold millions worldwide. They are people who have to exercise judgement in their daily activities; they do not expect to be bossed about but persuaded, convinced.
Few of them are agents of change. On the contrary, most are engaged in preventing or suppressing it. But it is from among them that the agents of change emanate. Support for the German Greens in the early days was disproportionately from under-35s educated to university-entrance level: 28 percent of Green voters in 1984 compared to 7.7 percent of the electorate in general. In Britain, two-thirds of Green party workers in 1990 were university students or graduates and nearly half were employed in professional or technical occupations.
What distinguishes them is mobility. They hawk their increasingly narrow skills over ever-greater distances; and they are mobile in a career sense, as their narrow specialisms die out to be superseded by others. Entwined with these obvious, external expressions, there is an internal mobility that both reflects them and makes them possible: the idea of change, not fixity, as the prevailing condition. These make for impatience with dogma and tradition, a restlessness in the face of received opinion. They also make for a migration in loyalties and attachments.
On the premise that people need some fixed points in order to function, whether these constitute a routine or a belief or a tightly circumscribed and fully determined behaviour pattern (as in a military barracks), increasing mobility in all its aspects favours attachment to purpose over attachment to organization. It changes the relative weight of means and ends in favour of ends. The transitory, fleeting coalition which forms easily, dissolves and disappears only to re-form and again slide away, is both more adapted to the prevailing circumstances, at least in the heartlands of the market system, and more congenial to the modern agents of change, than the fixed structures of a party. Instead of consistent, routine work for and through a long-lasting organization, the preferred modes of the modern agent of change are sudden fusion and fission, multi-faceted activity and association, constant rejigging of connexions and relationships. The agents themselves are defined more in terms of subjective orientation than by their objective position at work.
Something of the way they operate can be gleaned from the course of events in the last forty years or so. The US entered the 1960s with an unprecedented number of students which rose to an average of 45 percent from 15 in the previous decade. The 1960s alone registered the largest percentage growth of any decade. It was they who ignited the civil rights movement and, later in the decade the anti-(Vietnam) war movement. They did so largely outside the framework of traditional parties, even of the so-called, self-defined revolutionary parties. They coalesced in new, short-life organizations. Prime among the dedicated civil rights organizations was SNCC (Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee) itself made up of many autonomous groups and part of a larger shifting coalition of civil rights organizations and groups. None of them survived more than a few years; most disappeared quickly. Those that continued broadened their concerns, and adopted some of the structures and habits of a political party. They all lost members and mostly collapsed. Many of their brightest stars quickly burned out.
Despite their ephemeral nature, these movements had noticeable effects on the political and social landscape of the US. They contributed something to the passing of the Civil Rights Act, 1964, to the withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, and to the rundown of the domestic nuclear power industry.
Something similar can be said of the student upheaval in Europe starting in 1968. Fuelled by a vast increase in numbers and fired partly by the example of the US, students throughout Western Europe left marks of their public involvement everywhere. In France, they detonated the most extensive strike of workers ever, which in turn swept de Gaulle from power.
Yet the student uprising was uncoordinated in any but the loosest sense. Frustration, anger, the feeling of being bottled up were shared. Tactics and style were copied from one centre to another; messages exchanged; visitors housed and entertained. But there was no coordinating centre, no systematic, long-term collaboration. Individual student centres were themselves coalitions of faculties, each body of students going its own way.
There was nothing approaching permanence. The ferment subsided quickly. By the early 1970s, almost all had gone back to their books and lecture halls.
The most far-reaching change since the Second World War occurred with the collapse of state capitalism (aka Communism) in 1989. As in the US and western Europe 20 years previously, the background was formed by the enormous growth in the educated classes which soaked up the rising tide of information and propaganda emanating from the centres of the mainstream market system. The education might have been narrow, technical and infused with an unprobing orthodoxy, but it was widespread. There was a vast flowering of the knowledge strata, privileged materially (in consumer goods, living space, foreign travel), but excluded from real power by party functionaries who knew less, were less competent, and increasingly ludicrous in their dependency. The same was more or less true for all the countries of eastern Europe.
The inflow of information and propaganda was rising fast, receivable mainly in the countries at the system’s borders – notably East Germany, but also Estonia and Czechoslovakia. The number of tourists entering the USSR was virtually zero in the late 1940s, around 1 million per annum in the early 1960s and around 4 million per annum in the mid-1980s. The number of tourists going abroad from the USSR increased 13 times between 1950 and 1985. The approximate number in 1956 was 561,000 and in 1985 it was about 4.5 million. Over the same period there were increasing numbers of students from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe studying in the rest of the world, with the same trend apparent for foreign students in the state capitalist countries. The information walls between the two major variants of market society were crumbling well before the Berlin Wall was breached in November 1989.
As in the West, it was the mostly young, informed knowledge workers and students who provided the thrust for change. In Moscow, it was intellectuals such as Nobel Prize winning physicist Andrei Sakharov, who attacked the constitutional privilege of the Communist Party. It was in heavy journals such as Literaturnaya Gazeta in Moscow, and on television that the policy battles were fought.
The actors in the drama of Communism’s collapse in Prague in November 1989 were typical of the movers and shakers in Eastern Europe as a whole. The events started on 17 November with a large student demonstration to commemorate the funeral of Jan Opletal, a medical student killed by the Nazis 50 years previously. The following day – 18 November – actors and theatre people from all over Prague gathered at the Realistic Theatre to discuss the violent behaviour of the police at the demonstration, and to back a call by drama students for a strike in protest. Plays were pulled in favour of nightly agit-prop in the theatres. On Sunday the 19th students from all colleges and universities set up a city-wide strike-coordinating committee, with two representatives from each institution, which drew up a list of 10 demands. On Monday, 20th, the Committee met at the Drama Academy, members of the public brought food and money for the faculty of journalism, secondary school students joined the strike, and striking actors set out from Prague to tour the provinces. Next day, Tuesday the 21st, a handful of newspapers broke the official silence to publish details of the strike. Rock musicians donated sound equipment for speakers at the now-daily meetings in Wenceslas Square, addressed amongst others by playwright, later President, Vaclav Havel. Wednesday the 22nd saw 100,000 students on strike throughout the country. The following day, Thursday the 23rd, the Communist Youth Union met for the first time and heard reports on the situation in industrial plants; footballers joined the strike; and television workers voted 4,900 to 300 to broadcast live the meetings in Wenceslas Square. That day, for the first time, a contingent of workers, from the Prague CKD locomotive plant, arrived at Wenceslas Square with banners unfurled. On Friday the 24th, Alexander Dubcek addressed 300,000 people for the first time since the Prague Spring 21 years before, and an amateur video of the events on 17 November was screened on television. Saturday the 25th saw protest singer Jaroslav Hutka return from 12 years in exile. The next day, Sunday 26th, representatives of the striking students met three ministers; and Prime Minister Adamec and government officials received a Civic Forum delegation led by Vaclav Havel; the Civic Forum initiated discussions on the formation of independent political parties and the transition to multiparty democracy. The following day, Monday the 27th, workers across the country joined the strike; workers from the Industrial Fifth District marched to the Prague city centre; tens of thousands of workers and students met in front of the Technical University. Everything was broadcast live on television. The regime’s fate was then sealed. The Communist Party had no tolerable half-way house between power and powerlessness.
This might have been revolution; but it was set off largely by students and intellectuals. Its main battlefront was the television screen flickering in nearly every Czechoslovak living room. Workers were gradually drawn in by flying squads of students who went from factory to factory explaining, exhorting, entreating. When the workers came out, they were not leading.
The rest of Eastern Europe showed the same pattern: students, journalists, entertainers were in the forefront of change, acting as the merchants of upheaval. Nowhere did the massed industrial workers – the proletariat – produce the vanguard party or the organization which reached beyond the ruling constraints.
The organizations and associations that fomented the upheavals in the state capitalist world proved unstable. Jealous of their autonomies, unwilling or unable to compromise, prone to coalescing in temporary alliances when the targets were clear and then to leaving them and reforming in another configuration only to fragment again, they were above all short-lived.
The organizations that effectively changed the direction of politics in the second half of the century and influenced millions of people, were strung along a continuum from intense public activism to simple receptivity. They proved able to focus sharply on an issue when occasion demanded and circumstances favoured common action, and were able as quickly to dissolve and disappear from view. They were a shifting, largely amateur company of think-alikes that offered little in the way of a target for the ponderous structures of conventional politics and coercion. They punched rather than pushed; and they were incorruptible because transient.
The potential effect of such organizations is greater today than it has ever been. Their channel is the Internet, the worldwide communications web designed to operate in conditions of extreme disruption, able to convene – and disperse – countless numbers at a keystroke. Attempts by governments throughout the world to control it have foundered on the technical wizardry of its users and on its essential borderlessness. Censorship cannot but be loose since no government can impose its laws on any other, and none will willingly exclude itself from the economic benefits that depend increasingly on the quick and unimpeded flow of information to which it contributes.
Wild, anarchic, irreverent and rude, the Internet prospers, changing the nature of politics as it grows. Mainstream politicians have groped at the new technology, persuading US voters to consult the political sites set up for presidential elections. In Britain, some Members of Parliament run ‘constituency surgeries’ on the Net, and provide e-mail access to their constituents.
At the same time, dissidents of all sorts – political, criminal, lifestyle – have embraced it, extending their reach, their effectiveness and their self-protection enormously. For every weirdo disporting him- or herself on the Net, propagating their certainties to millions (that the postal zip code is an Internal Revenue Service conspiracy, that there is no such thing as citizenship of the US – so please send $150 for a Washintaw passport) there is a serious grouping or movement reaching out of its isolation to advance its cause without breaking its cover to security and other state services. The grouping might be minute – three or four like-mindeds anywhere – but it can influence, mobilize and coordinate many.
In August 1995, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe declared that homosexuals should not ‘have any rights at all’ and threatened them all with arrest – they were ‘sub animal’. Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (founded not long before, in 1989) jumped on to the Internet. In Johannesburg later that month, in New Zealand that November, in Holland in December, wherever he went, Mugabe found Net-alerted protesters chanting ‘Two four six eight, is Mugabe really straight?’
On 27 September 1997 the Neptune Jade sailed into Oakland Harbour on a wave of Internet messages. It was bound for Yusen Terminals with 160 containers loaded at Thamesport on the Isle of Grain, London, where Mersey Docks is the Port Authority. Met in Oakland by pickets representing the Liverpool dockers, on strike since being locked out by Mersey Docks two years previously, it weighed anchor after four days and headed up the coast to Vancouver, only to encounter another line of pickets. It then sailed on to Yokohama where the dockers refused to handle the blacked containers. It sailed on to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and was then sold. The Net had provided substantial leverage to organized but widely dispersed labour, in the teeth of virulent legal and industrial intimidation on three Continents.
In the Spring of 1998, Indonesian protesters by-passed the state-controlled media by posting a web site that reported on the corruption of President Suharto and his family. People across the country added information which fuelled an already inflammatory situation. Students also relied on the internet to coordinate the demonstrations across that vast country which led ultimately to Suharto’s resignation.
Such ‘hacktivists’ have used the internet to protest against conditions in East Timor, Kashmir, Kosovo, China.
In the Autumn and Winter of 1998 when Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia was hounding his former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, and through him, the reformasi movement, the internet proved as powerful as a cloud. Although there were only 50,000 internet users registered in the country at the time, within weeks of Anwar’s arrest (September) there were more than sixty pro-reform websites some with over two and a half million hits. Reformasi organizers found they could get a demonstration going within one or two hours via their websites, and use them afterwards to post reports and pictures describing what had happened.
Within hours of Abdulla Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish PKK’s, abduction by the Turkish military in Nairobi in 1999, hundreds of party supporters had taken control of Greek and Kenyan embassies in 20 countries.
Free Burma groups have established home pages on the Web, out of reach of Myanmar’s murderous military junta, where those interested can find campaign material, a directory of the many organizations involved, copies of relevant American legislation, and a special section on the movement’s heroine and Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The Free Burma movement’s successes in persuading the US to impose sanctions on Myanmar in 1997 and some American firms to back out of the country owes much to the Internet as an organizational tool arranging demonstrations and e-mail campaigns, and disseminating news. The Peruvian guerrilla group, Shining Path (or The Communist Party of Peru) disseminates its official documents from its website out of range of the regime’s killers and torturers, as did the Zapatistas in Mexico’ Chiapas. And so on. Examples are almost endless.
In Vietnam and Singapore where state control is exercised over the servers through which internet users have to pass to gain access to the world wide web, controls are routinely evaded by linking up to proxy servers which have not been banned, using them to access blocked websites. All the Chinese government’s efforts to strangle the democracy movement by denying it information have failed. Big Reference, a US-based pro-democracy internet magazine, manages to get through to 250,000 e-mail addresses in the country with regular updates of news and views. Taiwanese newspapers, also banned on the mainland, are readily available on the net. The government is riven by debate about how far it can open the economy and still screen out interference.
On 18 June 1999 an international Carnival Against Capitalism was marked with a riot in the City (London’s financial district) which paralyzed the police, with 10,000 marching against Shell in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, a mass rally in Gujarat, India, demanding ‘bread not nuclear bombs’, picketing outside McDonalds in Minsk, Belarus, a parade through the Stock Exchange in Montevideo’s financial centre, Uruguay. There were street carnivals in Amsterdam, Austin (Texas), Barcelona, Eugene (Oregon), Los Angeles, New York, Prague, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Toronto and Zurich. Protesters ‘washed’ major banks in Geneva. Stock exchanges were blockaded in Madrid and Vancouver, and a pile of dead wombats left to adorn the exchange in Melbourne.
Its greatest success was in disrupting the annual WTO meeting in Seattle in November 1999 when national delegates were prevented from entering the venue by a coalition of environmentalists, trade unionists and professional protesters in a mass demonstration. The battle of Seattle coincided – via the internet – with separate demonstrations in 15 countries from Nepal to Japan. It was followed by similar international protests in Prague (September 2000), Nice (December 2000), Quebec (April 2001), London (May 2001), and a mighty demonstration in Genoa (July 2001).
The net profoundly changes the way activists relate to information and make contact with each other. Instead of receiving news from uncontrolled services on high, and then distilling local action, they generate their own information and distribute it to their like-mindeds who comment on it, refine it in a spontaneous reiterative creation of an open and evolving virtual cyberbrain.
Market society has run its course. Its limitations are becoming apparent to growing numbers in its heartlands. Alternatives are blossoming in the luxuriance of ecological ideas and in the vibrant growth of the new technologies arising from and serving them. The enzymes of fundamental change are everywhere and spreading, leading a clandestine existence as may be, but waiting to be activated.
There are bound to be setbacks.
Without the change we need it is conceivable that the spiral of reciprocating violence amongst the protagonists of the old way of living will engulf hundreds of millions of people. Swathes of society might disappear as increasingly powerful microparasites mirror the behaviour of their macro cousins and invade the territory annexed by war and civil war. A modern Black Death might well disfigure the world.
Without the change we need huge numbers might succumb to global inundations, economic and social collapse. The earth itself might be damaged. Life on it might become restricted and reduced.
But human consciousness and its technological accompaniments, the ultimate product of life and its evolutionary march, cannot be extinguished. As it succumbs to its own limitations, the market system can delay, it cannot prevent, a leap to eternity.
This extract is edited from Chapter 8 The Leap to Eternity, other parts of the book and related documents by John Rudge in order to provide an appropriate finale to a large, unfinished, unpublished book presented in the, admittedly imperfect, form of multiple extracts.
Last updated on 13 November 2019