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The “job guarantee” plans, many of them pressed by Democratic White House hopefuls, vary in scope and cost, but they all center on government-sponsored employment that pays well above the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage — a New Deal for a new age, absent the bread lines and unemployment rates of the Great Depression. The most aggressive plans seek to all but eradicate unemployment and to set a new wage floor for all working Americans, pressuring private employers to raise wages if they want to compete for workers.

How such guarantees would be paid for is still largely unresolved. And criticism of the idea has emerged not only from conservatives who detect a whiff of socialism but also from liberals who say guaranteed employment is the wrong way to attack the central issue facing workers in this low-unemployment economy: stagnant wages.

According to Vincenzo Caponi’s “The Effects of Public Sector Employment on the Economy,” he examines the impact on public sector employment on the economy as a whole. Whenever the public sector creates jobs by hiring citizens to provide goods and services, it has both positive and negative effects on the labor market (Caponi, 2017). His research showed that the unemployment rate decreased in the short-term, creating more stabilizing effect in economy. Along with this, certain demands in inequity were met in places that had higher levels of poverty in comparison to others. Plus, with the higher levels of public sector jobs, many employers were encouraged to employ disadvantaged and marginalized Americans (Caponi, 2017). At the same time, the reduction of short-term unemployment by expanding public sector jobs were not efficient, because wages in the public sector are flexible and not fixed. This expansion of public sector jobs created a crowding-out effect of private sector, where many people left their low-paying private sector jobs to work for the public sector that provided higher levels of stability. To add to this, wages are unresponsive to productivity differences, so if workers are less or more productive in the public sector, they do not see salary increases or decreases (Caponi, 2017). With the crowding-out effect leading to labor shortage and lack of overall productivity in public-sector jobs, Caponi’s research suggests that there is a reduction in the overall productivity of the economy, coupled with the negative effects of the resource reallocation from the private to the public sector.

When it comes to the Federal Job Guarantee plan, Caponi’s discussed impacts show how a massive public sector work project can have many drawbacks to the private sector. In Greg Ip’s Wall Street Journal article titled The Problem with a Federal Jobs Guarantee (Hint: It's Not the Price Tag), Ip discusses the challenges that the private sector will face with wages, inflation, and technology after the implementation of the Federal Job Guarantee plan. First in order to keep many of the workers that make less than $15/hour, the private sector will see massive salary increases. Employers will be forced to raise the salaries of their workers, because they do not want to lose their labor, similar to a $15 minimum wage effect (Ip, 2018). This will lead the companies to potentially raise the private sector causing rise in customer costs to offset their short-term losses in revenue. This raised cost on customers will negatively impact certain businesses more than others (Ip, 2018). Policies such as this will positively impact labor in big firms like Wal-Mart that can afford offering health benefits or wage increases (Ip, 2018). But these policies will hurt smaller firms to a mega scale, that cannot offer the same benefits as the public sector would with Job Guarantee. Overall this may intensify the oligopoly market that we have in the country, because many small businesses or start-ups, will be unable to meet labor or revenue demands to stay afloat (Edwards, 2016). This would make many argue that the Job Guarantee plan will not be very positive for the private sector as a whole. It may force labor or employment changes against the market need, that may help some, but forced changes have mixed effects from unequal benefits.

#3: It could crowd out tens of millions of private sector jobs. There are currently 54 million people who earn $15 an hour or less. When they find out the federal government is offering $15 an hour plus benefits and permanent job security, many of those workers would quit their current job and join the federal workforce.3 Companies that could afford to would raise wages to keep some of these workers; other companies would simply go out of business. The labor markets would be controlled by the government in ways never seen before in America. And even if just half of low-wage private sector workers quit, the number of federal employees would rise by between 35 and 40 million.4 Costs to the government would then rise to anywhere from $1.6 trillion to $2.24 trillion per year, and the private sector would see massive repercussions.

#4: Inflation would rise. A sudden increase in the cost of labor for businesses will lead to inflation throughout the economy because of higher business costs that will need to be passed on to consumers. In addition, when only those at the bottom of the income distribution get a defacto raise to $15, there are upstream consequences. Workers who were making $15 an hour may demand $20 an hour now. Workers making $20 an hour might want $25 an hour and so on. This may seem like a benefit, but “this is a story of serious wage-price spiral, unless we introduce other measures,” warns progressive economist Dean Baker.5 We have been very fortunate that inflation has been well under control for the last few decades. A federal jobs guarantee could change that pretty quickly.

#5: It would be an administrative nightmare. Finally, matching millions of workers to the jobs envisioned under a jobs guarantee would be an administrative nightmare to implement. State and local governments will be tasked with finding the productive work to do, but how do we train millions of people to do these jobs? How does the Department of Labor oversee the millions of new jobs to make sure they’re legitimate? What are the qualifiers for the kind of work that’s eligible? What if a right-leaning state wants jobs done that a left-leaning federal government deems unproductive or socially unacceptable like building an oil pipeline or opening up a coal mine?

Finally, how does the federal government fire workers who are guaranteed a job? Tcherneva argues that workers can be fired for not showing up or threatening the safety of others, but what about extremely poor performance?

Technology is more than just a weapon for inter-capitalist competition; it is a weapon in struggles between capital and labor. Technological changes that create unemployment, de-skill the workforce, and enable one sector of the workforce to be played against another shift the balance of power in capital’s favor. Given this asymmetry, advances in productivity that could reduce work time while expanding real wages lead instead to forced layoffs, increasing stress for those still employed and eroding real wages.

Two ongoing technological developments further strengthen the power of capital. Advances in transportation and communication now enable production and distribution chains to be extended across the globe, allowing capital to implement “divide and conquer” strategies against labor to an unprecedented extent.

Unlike most utopians, Otto Neurath had a chance to change the world. One of the polymaths that fin de siècle Vienna seemed to produce in droves, Neurath – a leading philosopher, economist, designer, civil servant and curator – was appointed as head planner for the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.

This revolutionary state, which lasted little more than a month in the spring of 1919, emerged from the ruins of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, when the hardship and social unrest of the period helped foment the 1918-19 German Revolution. The new republic’s leaders confronted adverse circumstances not dissimilar from our own as they attempted to build a new society threatened by a pandemic, war and nascent fascism.

The unreality of postulating the sustainable solution of the grave problems of our social order within the formal and legal framework and corresponding constraints of parliamentary politics arises from the fundamental misconception of the structural determinations of capital’s rule, as represented in all varieties that assert the dualism of civil society and the political state. The difficulty, insurmountable within the parliamentary framework, is this that since capital is actually in control of all vital aspects of the social metabolism, it can afford to define the separately constituted sphere of political legitimation as a strictly formal and legal matter, thereby necessarily excluding the possibility of being legitimately challenged in its substantive sphere of socioeconomic reproductive operation. Directly or indirectly, capital controls everything, including the parliamentary legislative process, even if the latter is supposed to be fully independent from capital in many theories that fictitiously hypostatize the “democratic equality” of all political forces participating in the legislative process. To envisage a very different relationship to the powers of decision making in our societies, now completely dominated by the forces of capital in every domain, it is necessary to radically challenge capital itself as the overall controller of social metabolic reproduction.

What makes this problem worse for all those who are looking for significant change on the margins of the established political system is that the latter can claim for itself genuine constitutional legitimacy in its present mode of functioning, based on the historically constituted inversion of the actual state of the material reproductive affairs. For inasmuch as the capitalist is not only the “personification of capital” but simultaneously functions also “as the personification of the social character of labor, of the total workshop as such,”53 the system can claim to represent the vitally necessary productive power of society vis-à-vis the individuals as the basis of their continued existence, incorporating the interest of all. In this way capital asserts itself not only as the defacto but also as the dejure power of society, in its capacity as the objectively given necessary condition of societal reproduction, and thereby as the constitutional foundation to its own political order. The fact that the constitutional legitimacy of capital is historically founded on the ruthless expropriation of the conditions of social metabolic reproduction—the means and material of labor—from the producers, and therefore capital’s claimed “constitutionality” (like the origin of all constitutions) is unconstitutional, is an unpalatable truth which fades away in the mist of a remote past. The “social productive powers of labor, or productive powers of social labor, first develop historically with the specifically capitalist mode of production, hence appear as something immanent in the capital-relation and inseparable from it.”54

Indeed, history has been unkind to all such attempts to provide detailed forecasts of the future, particularly if they simply extend current trends and leave the bulk of humanity and their struggles out of the picture. It is for this reason that a dialectical view is so important. The actual course of history can never be predicted. The only thing certain about historical change is the existence of the struggles that drive it forward and that guarantee its discontinuous character. Both implosions and explosions inevitably materialize, rendering the world for new generations different than that of the old. History points to numerous social systems that have reached the limits of their ability to adapt their social relations to allow for the rational and sustainable use of developing productive forces. Hence, the human past is dotted by periods of regression, followed by revolutionary accelerations that sweep all before them. As the conservative historian Jacob Burckhardt declared in the nineteenth century, “a historical crisis” occurs when “a crisis in the whole state of things is produced, involving whole epochs and all or many peoples of the same civilization.… The historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled.” He called this the “acceleration of historical processes.”91¶ Burckhardt principally had in mind social revolutions, like the French Revolution of 1789. This was an acceleration of history that, as the modern French historian Georges Lefebvre explained, commenced as a series of widening revolutions, mutating with terrifying speed, from an aristocratic revolution to a bourgeois revolution to a popular revolution and then a peasant revolution—finally taking on the character of a historic “bloc, a single thing,” seemingly unconquerable, which reshaped much of world history.92¶ Could such a revolutionary acceleration of history, though on an incomparably greater scale, happen in the twenty-first century? Most establishment commentators in the hegemonic countries of the world imperialist system would say no, based on their own narrow experience and limited view of history. Nevertheless, revolutions continue to break out in the periphery of the world system and are, even now, only put down by imperialist economic, political, and military interventions. Moreover, the failure of capitalism on a planetary scale today threatens all of civilization and life on the planet as we know it. If drastic changes are not made, global temperature this century will increase by 4° or even 6°C from preindustrial times, leading to conditions that will imperil humankind as a whole. Meanwhile, the extreme capitalism of today seeks to expropriate and enclose all the bases of material existence, siphoning off almost the entire net social surplus and robbing the natural environment for the direct benefit of a miniscule few.¶ As a direct result of capitalist social relations, the material challenges now facing humanity are greater than anything ever seen before, pointing to an accumulation of catastrophe along with the accumulation of capital.93 Hundreds of millions of people under these circumstances are already being drawn into struggles with the system, creating the basis of a new worldwide movement toward socialism. In his book Can the Working Class Change the World? Yates answers yes, it can. But it can only do so through a unifying struggle by workers and peoples aimed at genuine socialism.94¶ It may be objected that socialism has been tried and has failed and hence no longer exists as an alternative. However, like the earliest attempts at capitalism in the Italian city-states of the late Middle Ages, which were not strong enough to survive amongst the feudal societies that surrounded them, the failure of the first experiments at socialism presage nothing but its eventual rebirth in a new, more revolutionary, more universal form, which examines and learns from the failures.95 Even in failure, socialism has this advantage over capitalism: it is motivated by the demand for “freedom in general,” rooted in substantive equality and sustainable human development—reflecting precisely those collective social relations, borne of historical necessity and the unending struggle for human freedom, crucial to human survival in our time.96¶ The great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter, who, as Austrian finance minister in Red Vienna, had allied himself for a time with the socialist government and found himself attacked on all sides, once wrote that capitalism would perish not because of “the weight of economic failure,” but rather because its “very success” in pursuing its narrow economic ends, had undermined the sociological foundations of its existence. Capitalism, Schumpeter exclaimed, “‘inevitably’ creates conditions in which it will not be able to live and which strongly point to socialism as its heir apparent.”97 He was, it turns out, in many ways correct, though not entirely in the way he expected. The global development of monopoly capitalism and financialization spearheaded by the very same counterrevolutionary neoliberalism that first arose in response to Red Vienna in the interwar years—at a time when Schumpeter himself was a major actor—has now undermined the material bases, not so much of capitalism itself, but of global society and planetary ecology. The result has been the emergence of an “atmosphere of almost universal hostility” to the prevailing social order, though, playing out in the confused context of the present, less as opposition to capitalism itself than to neoliberalism.98¶ It is capitalism’s undermining of the very basis of human existence that will eventually compel the world’s workers and peoples to seek new roads forward. An inclusive, class-based movement toward socialism in this century will open up the possibility of qualitative new developments that the anarchy of the capitalist-market society with its monopolistic competition, extreme inequality, and institutionalized greed cannot possibly offer.99 This includes the development of a socialist technology, in which both the forms of technology utilized and the purposes to which they are put are channeled in social directions, as opposed to individual and class gain.100 It introduces the prospect of long-term democratic planning at all levels of society, allowing decisions to be made and distributions to occur outside the logic of the cash nexus.101 Socialism, in its most radical form, is about substantive equality, community solidarity, and ecological sustainability; it is aimed at the unification—not simply division—of labor.¶ Once sustainable human development, rooted not in exchange values, but in use values and genuine human needs, comes to define historical advance, the future, which now seems closed, will open up in a myriad ways, allowing for entirely new, more qualitative, and collective forms of development.102 This can be seen in the kinds of needed practical measures that could be taken up, but which are completely excluded under the present mode of production. It is not physical impossibility, or lack of economic surplus, most of which is currently squandered, that stands in the way of the democratic control of investment, or the satisfaction of basic needs—clean air and water, food, clothing, housing, education, health care, transportation, and useful work—for all. It is not the shortage of technological know-how or of material means that prevents the necessary ecological conversion to more sustainable forms of energy.103 It is not some inherent division of humanity that obstructs the construction of a New International of workers and peoples directed against capitalism, imperialism, and war.104 All of this is within our reach, but requires pursuing a logic that runs counter to that of capitalism.

The issue of economic growth has divided socialists and environmentalists. Ecosocialism, however, rejects the dualistic frame of growth versus degrowth, development versus anti-development, because both positions share a purely quantitative conception of productive forces. A third position resonates more with the task ahead: the qualitative transformation of development. ¶ A new development paradigm means putting an end to the egregious waste of resources under capitalism, driven by large-scale production of useless and harmful products. The arms industry is, of course, a dramatic example, but, more generally, the primary purpose of many of the “goods” produced—with their planned obsolescence—is to generate profit for large corporations. The issue is not excessive consumption in the abstract, but the prevalent type of consumption, based as it is on massive waste and the conspicuous and compulsive pursuit of novelties promoted by “fashion.” A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, including water, food, clothing, housing, and such basic services as health, education, transport, and culture. ¶ Obviously, the countries of the Global South, where these needs are very far from being satisfied, must pursue greater classical “development”—railroads, hospitals, sewage systems, and other infrastructure. Still, rather than emulate how affluent countries built their productive systems, these countries can pursue development in far more environmentally friendly ways, including the rapid introduction of renewable energy. While many poorer countries will need to expand agricultural production to nourish hungry, growing populations, the ecosocialist solution is to promote agroecology methods rooted in family units, cooperatives, or larger-scale collective farms—not the destructive industrialized agribusiness methods involving intensive inputs of pesticides, chemicals, and GMOs.2 ¶ At the same time, the ecosocialist transformation would end the heinous debt system the Global South now confronts as well as the exploitation of its resources by advanced industrial countries and rapidly developing countries like China. Instead, we can envision a strong flow of technical and economic assistance from North to South rooted in a robust sense of solidarity and the recognition that planetary problems require planetary solutions. This need not entail that people in affluent countries “reduce their standard of living”—only that they shun the obsessive consumption, induced by the capitalist system, of useless commodities that do not meet real needs or contribute to human well-being and flourishing. ¶ But how do we distinguish authentic from artificial and counterproductive needs? To a considerable degree, the latter are stimulated by the mental manipulation of advertising. In contemporary capitalist societies, the advertising industry has invaded all spheres of life, shaping everything from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to sports, culture, religion, and politics. Promotional advertising has become ubiquitous, insidiously infesting our streets, landscapes, and traditional and digital media, molding habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption. Moreover, the ad industry itself is a source of considerable waste of natural resources and labor time, ultimately paid by the consumer, for a branch of “production” that lies in direct contradiction with real social-ecological needs. While indispensable to the capitalist market economy, the advertising industry would have no place in a society in transition to ecosocialism; it would be replaced by consumer associations that vet and disseminate information on goods and services. While these changes are already happening to some extent, old habits would likely persist for some years, and nobody has the right to dictate peoples’ desires. Altering patterns of consumption is an ongoing educational challenge within a historical process of cultural change. ¶ A fundamental premise of ecosocialism is that in a society without sharp class divisions and capitalist alienation, “being” will take precedence over “having.” Instead of seeking endless goods, people pursue greater free time, and the personal achievements and meaning it can bring through cultural, athletic, recreational, scientific, erotic, artistic, and political activities. There is no evidence that compulsive acquisitiveness stems from intrinsic “human nature,” as conservative rhetoric suggests. Rather, it is induced by the commodity fetishism inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising. Ernest Mandel summarizes this critical point well: “The continual accumulation of more and more goods [...] is by no means a universal and even predominant feature of human behavior. The development of talents and inclinations for their own sake; the protection of health and life; care for children; the development of rich social relations [...] become major motivations once basic material needs have been satisfied.”

However, while the Marxist critique makes it clear that the ecological crisis cannot be solved within the parameter of global capitalism, socialism, as it is often understood, will also not in itself overcome the ecological crisis. The problem here is not just that what has been called “really existing socialism” in the twentieth century, most notably the Soviet Union and China which were ecological disasters, but the anthropocentric and productivist assumptions that were built into much of classical socialist thinking. The anthropocentric assumption implies that human beings have a privileged position vis-à-vis the rest of nature and have, therefore, the right to exploit and change nature fully to their advantage; in effect, that we must conquer nature. The productivist assumption is the assumption that production can be unlimited—in order that, by using increased technological development to reduce necessary collective labor time, we can go from the “kingdom of necessity” to the “realm of freedom.” Nature, then, remains a resource to be controlled and dominated. ¶ There is a need then for a new way of thinking about socialism— what has been called “ecosocialism.” In an article entitled “Five Theses on Ecosocialism,” Joel Kovel defines ecosocialism as follows: “Ecosocialism is a transformation of the original socialist project. It is ‘this-epoch socialism,’ reflecting the ascension of the ecological crisis alongside and interpenetrated with the accumulation crises of classical capitalism.” Kovel goes on to insist that ecosocialism is not just a new mode of production but also “a new mode of being, a spiritual as well as a material transforming proceeding from a prefiguration.” Thus, it is not just a vision of a new society but a “prefigurative praxis” in which the social praxis of the present is animated by such a vision, a praxis which challenges the logic of endless growth and adopts “an ethic of ecocentrism, that is, of caring for nature and granting it intrinsic value.” In a keynote address at the Economic Ecosocialism conference in Quito, Ecuador, Kovel reiterates the idea of granting nature an intrinsic value, which he defines “as an assertion that we should value nature for itself, irrespective of what we would do to it—value it intrinsically and thereby as a function of its inherent right.” Thus, it is not enough to reject exchange value and embrace use value. Use value must also be rejected when it conflicts with the intrinsic value of nature, and the embracing of the intrinsic value of nature is a social and spiritual praxis. For Kovel, “spirit is a dimension of human existence defined by the property of going beyond the socially constructed boundaries of the self.” As we shall see, the spiritual dimension of existence can also present a challenge to all self constructions, including the construction of a species-self. ¶ Kovel, claims that some of the failure of traditional socialist thinking can be traced to Marx. While applauding the early Marx’s recognition of the integral relation between humanity and the rest of nature, a recognition that prefigures an ecocentric ethic, and while granting that elements of his earlier ecological understanding remain in Marx’s mature work, Kovel nonetheless argues that “as Marx matured his youthful insight into the unity of humanism and naturalism became weaker.” As an example of Marx’s turning away from his earlier ecological insight, Kovel cites Marx’s famous passage describes the labor process in Capital, volume one. Commenting on that passage, Kovel writes, In Capital nature is reduced to an organ subordinated to the master’s mind and an instrument of labor, indeed, the whole earth is seen as such an instrument. Though the worker is a force of nature, he is opposed to nature, and this opposition is chosen of his own accord. Thus Man is purely active, as nature is passive. . .. If nature is just a thing-like ‘stuff’ for “Man” to work upon, then it has lost the formative quality essential for ecosystemic being. ¶ In contrast, Kovel suggests that an ecocentric understanding of labor would recognize nature’s “co-productivity.” It would “involve a going-with nature, a reading of its ways, and fundamentally, a kind of receptivity to it: a realization that we are not split off and above it. This opens upon a recognition of nature within us and ourselves within nature.”25 ¶ Michael Löwy has also developed an analysis of ecosocialism which goes beyond the way socialism has been traditionally understood. For Löwy, ecosocialism requires “that Marxists undertake a critical revision of `productive forces’ and that they break radically with the ideology of linear progress and with the technological and economic paradigm of mod-ern industrial civilization.”26 Like Kovel, Löwy identifies Marx as partially responsible for the problem. Was Marx productivist? Löwy answer is Yes and No. “No to the extent that no one has denounced the capitalist logic of capitalism—as well as the accumulation of capital, wealth, and commodities—as vehemently as Marx did. . .. For Marx, the supreme goal of technical progress is not the infinite accumulation of goods (‘having’) but the reduction of the work day and the accumulation of free time.”27 On the other hand, “Yes to the extent that one often sees in Marx and Engels (and all the more in later Marxism) a tendency to make `development of the productive forces’ the principle vector of progress, along with an insufficiently critical attitude toward industrial civilization, notably in its destructive relationship to the environment.”28 ¶ Are Kovel and Löwy right about Marx? This is the subject of a fierce debate. Marxist thinkers like John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, and Kohei Saito have offered a robust defense of Marx’s ecological bona fides, and they seek to demonstrate, through various passages in his later writings as well as his notebooks, that Marx not only understood the importance of an ecological perspective but also developed theoretical concepts that are crucial for the ecosocialist project. I shall not here enter into this debate. Instead, what I want to suggest is that for the purposes of this essay, it does not matter whether or not Kovel and Löwy are correct about Marx and Engels, since traditionally socialists who took their inspiration from Marx and Engels, did not very much care about the intrinsic value of nature and often considered the socialist project to entail the continued development of the forces of production and increased domination of nature. A typical example is Trotsky’s comment on the relation between human beings and nature in socialist society in an essay in Literature and Revolution: “through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety. . . . He will point out places for mountains and passes. He will change the course of rivers, and he will lay down rules for the ocean.”¶ Ecosocialism is not only a vision of a different kind of society, but it requires a human being with a sociality and a new sensibility that would differ not only from capitalist “human nature” but also from the traditional socialist “human nature.” While retaining the idea that “we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” it would insist that that this association sees itself as part of larger association with the totality of the biosphere and respect its “free development.” It would see humans as co-producers with nature. It would reject the idea that the continued development of the productive forces is a mark of progress or that the transition to a “higher phase of communist society” requires an increase of the productive forces to the point where “all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly.” Such a new sensibility would require not only new economic relations but new social relations grounded in a different kind of subjectivity.

Contemporary capitalist civilization is in crisis. The unlimited accumulation of capital, commodification of everything, ruthless exploitation of labor and nature, and attendant brutal competition undermine the bases of a sustainable future, thereby putting the very survival of the human species at risk. The deep, systemic threat we face demands a deep, systemic change: a Great Transition. ¶ In synthesizing the basic tenets of ecology and the Marxist critique of political economy, ecosocialism offers a radical alternative to an unsustainable status quo. Rejecting a capitalist definition of “progress” based on market growth and quantitative expansion (which, as Marx shows, is a destructive progress), it advocates policies founded on non-monetary criteria, such as social needs, individual well-being, and ecological equilibrium. Ecosocialism puts forth a critique of both mainstream “market ecology,” which does not challenge the capitalist system, and “productivist socialism,” which ignores natural limits.¶ As people increasingly realize how the economic and ecological crises intertwine, ecosocialism has been gaining adherents. Ecosocialism, as a movement, is relatively new, but some of its basic arguments date back to the writings of Marx and Engels. Now, intellectuals and activists are recovering this legacy and seeking a radical restructuring of the economy according to the principles of democratic ecological planning, putting human and planetary needs first and foremost. ¶ The “actually existing socialisms” of the twentieth century, with their often environmentally oblivious bureaucracies, do not offer an attractive model for today’s ecosocialists. Rather, we must chart a new path forward, one that links with the myriad movements around the globe that share the conviction that a better world is not only possible, but also necessary. ¶ Democratic Ecological Planning ¶ The core of ecosocialism is the concept of democratic ecological planning, wherein the population itself, not “the market” or a Politburo, make the main decisions about the economy. Early in the Great Transition to this new way of life, with its new mode of production and consumption, some sectors of the economy must be suppressed (e.g., the extraction of fossil fuels implicated in the climate crisis) or restructured, while new sectors are developed. Economic transformation must be accompanied by active pursuit of full employment with equal conditions of work and wages. This egalitarian vision is essential both for building a just society and for engaging the support of the working class for the structural transformation of the productive forces. ¶ Ultimately, such a vision is irreconcilable with private control of the means of production and of the planning process. In particular, for investments and technological innovation to serve the common good, decision-making must be taken away from the banks and capitalist enterprises that currently dominate, and put in the public domain. Then, society itself, and neither a small oligarchy of property owners nor an elite of techno-bureaucrats, will democratically decide which productive lines are to be privileged, and how resources are to be invested in education, health, and culture. Major decisions on investment priorities—such as terminating all coal-fired facilities or directing agricultural subsidies to organic production—would be taken by direct popular vote. Other, less important decisions would be taken by elected bodies, on the relevant national, regional, or local scale. ¶ Although conservatives fearmonger about “central planning,” democratic ecological planning ultimately supports more freedom, not less, for several reasons. First, it offers liberation from the reified “economic laws” of the capitalist system that shackle individuals in what Max Weber called an “iron cage.” Prices of goods would not be left to the “laws of supply and demand,” but would, instead, reflect social and political priorities, with the use of taxes and subsidies to incentivize social goods and disincentivize social ills. Ideally, as the ecosocialist transition moves forward, more products and services critical for meeting fundamental human needs would be freely distributed, according to the will of the citizens. ¶ Second, ecosocialism heralds a substantial increase in free time. Planning and the reduction of labor time are the two decisive steps towards what Marx called “the kingdom of freedom.” A significant increase of free time is, in fact, a condition for the participation of working people in the democratic discussion and management of economy and of society. ¶ Last, democratic ecological planning represents a whole society’s exercise of its freedom to control the decisions that affect its destiny. If the democratic ideal would not grant political decision-making power to a small elite, why should the same principle not apply to economic decisions? Under capitalism, use-value—the worth of a product or service to well-being—exists only in the service of exchange- value, or value on the market. Thus, many products in contemporary society are socially useless, or designed for rapid turnover (“planned obsolescence”). By contrast, in a planned ecosocialist economy, use-value would be the only criteria for the production of goods and services, with far-reaching economic, social, and ecological consequences.1 ¶ Planning would focus on large-scale economic decisions, not the small-scale ones that might affect local restaurants, groceries, small shops, or artisan enterprises. Importantly, such planning is consistent with workers’ self-management of their productive units. The decision, for example, to transform a plant from producing automobiles to producing buses and trams would be taken by society as a whole, but the internal organization and functioning of the enterprise would be democratically managed by its workers. There has been much discussion about the “centralized” or “decentralized” character of planning, but most important is democratic control at all levels—local, regional, national, continental, or international. For example, planetary ecological issues such as global warming must be dealt with on a global scale, and thereby require some form of global democratic planning. This nested, democratic decision-making is quite the opposite of what is usually described, often dismissively, as “central planning,” since decisions are not taken by any “center,” but democratically decided by the affected population at the appropriate scale.

I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing, but this trend has not always been explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement.¶ My goal in this essay is to argue that base building and dual power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing, and that party organizing can allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the United States.¶ One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for socialist politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed and marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them.¶ The base building emphasis on dual power responds directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to concretely demonstrate that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely more to create a socialist base of popular support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political education classes can ever hope to do. Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed.¶ The question, of course, remains: once we have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If it turns out that establishing socialist institutions to meet people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of communism, how can we mobilize that base?¶ Put simply: in order to mobilize the base which base builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of building a communist party. It is not enough to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead have a public face as a communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual power projects, we must make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply with establishing endless dual power organizations. We must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in order to make this clear we must adopt party organizing.¶ By “party organizing” I mean an organizational strategy which adopts the party model. Such organizing focuses on building a party whose membership is formally unified around a party line determined by democratic centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals, and for educating party members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the party model works to build dual power institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve. Organizations which adopt the party model focus on propagandizing around the need for revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political organizing, empowering local communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together, but is a formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism.¶ Party organizing has much to offer the base building movement. By working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a unified national and international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and unique form at the local level, we need to remember that our struggle is against a material base which functions not only at the national but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party model allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy to emerge from democratic consensus.¶ Furthermore, party organizing allows for local organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable for their actions. It allows criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each others strategies and to help correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the United States, such accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial society, imperialist and colonial ideal frequently infect leftist organizing. Creating formal unity and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these ideas allows us to address these consistent problems within American socialist organizing.¶ Having a formal party which unifies the various dual power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply meet peoples needs, but to pull them into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model creates a means for sustained growth to occur by unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows community members who have been served by dual power projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members and participating in the continued growth of base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating communities in communist theory and praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local conditions.¶ We also must recognize that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national unified party in the present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established organizations, it is not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally, it would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the organizational contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring.¶ What is important for base builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside building a national movement. This means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued local growth. The movement within the Marxist Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the right direction. The independent party emphasis within the Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the possibility of unification, and to maintain unification through a party model as a long term goal.¶ In the meantime, individual base building organizations ought to adopt party models for their local organizing. Local organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment into their organizations, education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror. Dual power institutions must be unified openly and transparent:sk around these organizations in order for them to operate as more than “red charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model remains the most useful method for achieving these ends.¶ The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most importantly, to mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel economy which exists as an end in and of itself.¶ It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various local base building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at the local level. If local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national party will have to be the long term goal of the base building movement.¶ Many of the already existing organizations within the base building movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, my hope is to suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship between dual power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism.¶ The long term details of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the movement finds itself operating within. I hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about base building organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the base building tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will be worked out over time and are not a good subject for public discussion.¶ I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for ensuring that such strategy will succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a conversation about how the base building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual organizations into a unified socialist tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly growing movement can succeed.

I argue that these three Lacanian orders relate to the basic areas of neural anatomy: the left and right neocortex, plus the subcortical areas (from limbic system to brainstem).21 Humans share with all pre-existing animals, at least as far back as reptiles, a core brainstem that regulates internal functions and processes instinctual responses to outside stimuli, such as the body's instant, unconscious reaction to danger. We share with mammals a limbic system (including the temporal lobes at the sides of the head) that evolved around the brainstem to process more complex emotions and learned behaviors.22 Like other primates, we also have an expanded neocortex as the outermost layer of our brain (with occipital lobes in the back of the head, parietal lobes at the top rear, and frontal lobes).23 However, humans evolved distinct functional areas on each side of the neocortex. The left neocortex has audioverbal, linear, causal, executive, prosocial, routine functions, in contrast to the right hemisphere's visuospatial, holistic, intuitive, devil's advocate, anxiety- biased, novelty-detecting processes.25 Distinctive language systems (syntax and semantics) are in the left hemisphere, in Broca's and Wernicke's areas,2' in nearly all right-handed people and most left-handed.2. The right brain has further ties to the emotional limbic system and instinctual brainstem, but the left tends to operate separately (especially in men28), expressing or inhibiting limbic emotions and right-cortical intuitions, through its rational language and executive controls. Specifically regarding theatrical mimesis, the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL) is used for recognizing "pantomimes executed by others" because it stores the "complex digrams" or schemas used in the "higher level intentional planning" of actions, while the right IPL is used for interpreting spatial orientation (Jacob and Jeannerod 253). Thus, certain left-cortical functions correlate with Lacan's Symbolic order of language, rules, and social codes, the right with the Imaginary, and the limbic system and brain- stem areas with the Real. Yet these three orders arc "inmixed" dimensions (Ragland-Sullivan 190), as are the corresponding areas of our brains. The Symbolic order resides primarily, but not solely within and between left brains, like the Imaginary in and between right hemispheres, and the Real in limbic systems and brainstems.2- I say "primarily" because there are also aspects of Symbolic language, involving imagery and emotions, in certain right-brain functions: making and interpreting metaphors, contextual meanings, puns, prosody, and non- verbal gestures (Ornstcin 103-08; Cozolino, Neuroscience of Psychotherapy 109). Thus, the right brain is used more for language, along with the left, by "expert" readers (Wolf 162). While the right brains Imaginary order is crucial for "sell-image" (Ornstein 132, 175-76), the spatial sense of ego also depends upon the left brain's "orientation area," as I will consider in the first chapter The general correspondence of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders to the brainstem/limbic system, right hemisphere, and left hemisphere is confirmed by research on developmental growth spurts in the neocortex during childhood. As in Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, with the infant's Imaginary ego initially developing through preverbal communication with the (m)Other, neuroscience shows that right-brain to right-brain "attunement" between the mother and child, during its first two years of life, profoundly shapes its emotional and perceptual pathways, especially its sense of self in relation to others (Cozolino, Neuroscience of Human 38, 66-75, 84-85; Neuroscience of Psychotherapy 191-92). The "prosocial self then shifts, through language development, into the left brain, with its growth in subsequent years (118; Wolf 185-88). This relates to the Lacanian Symbolic order of words and laws shaping the child more directly after the initial mirror stage, at 6-18 months. According to neuroscience, the self as a "distributed neural network that encompasses shared self-other representations" continues to be "right- hemisphere based" (Deccty and Sommerville 527). Recognition of one's own face can be lost when the right hemisphere is anesthetized (529)—demon- strating that the Imaginary perception of ego (or the Freudian "imago"), and its possible fading or Lacanian "aphanisis," is based in the right cortex.31 Regarding our potential for therapeutic and theatrical catharsis, there appears to be a crucial filter between Symbolic/Imaginary and Real orders (or superego /ego and id) in the prefrontal area of the neocortex, at the edge of the limbic system.3 Neurologists locate a "stimulus barrier" between the Freudian superego and id in the "ventromesial [or ventromedial regions of the prefrontal lobe [where it] merges into the limbic system" and protects the ego "from the incessant demands of instinctual life" (Kaplan-Solms and Solms 275-76).34 Here, cathartic changes may occur in how remnant natural instincts are expressed (or transformed through greater awareness), from mostly unconscious, limbic, Real emotions, through right-brain, Imaginary perceptions and fundamental fantasies, to the Symbolic order of language, rules, and self identity in relation to the social Other. Neurologists have also found four layers of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) with distinctive, nested, hierarchical functions (Koechlin et al.; Murphy and Brown 133-35). The premotor cortex, at the rear of the PFC, exerts sensory control, selecting specific motor (bodily action) responses to stimuli. The caudal lateral PFC, the next layer moving forward, adds contextual control regarding the current situation when stimuli are received. The rostral lateral PFC, a further anterior layer, then exerts episodic control over the other two, by tracking present and past information regarding general behavior, thus allowing for changing contingencies. (Murphy and Brown give the examples of answering the phone when it rings, not answering it at a friend s house, or answering it there because the friend IS in the shower and asks you to, as illustrating these three levels of stimulus response.) A fourth area is posited in the frontopolar cortex, used for cognitive branching and controlling the shifts between different episodes of behavior, while exerting control over the other three layers. Likewise, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) determines "reward value" choices, including the selection of "stimuli on the basis of familiarity and [selection of] responses on the basis of a feeling of Vightness" (Elliott et al. 308). The lateral regions of the OFC arc involved with "the suppression of previously rewarded responses." Brain imaging studies find that these areas are "fundamental" in behavioral choices, especially in "unpredictable situations." One might argue that the Lacanian Symbolic and Imaginary orders of cultural rules and personal perceptions connect with the Real of stimuli and actions through these areas of the PFC (just behind and above the ventrome- dial). The brain responds to familiar or unpredictable stimuli with inner theatrical representations and outer performances, through shifting, time-bound, contextual, sensory controls. Such controls are shaped in each human brain through learned cultural experiences of the social Other, which create further top-down constraints utilized by the PFC's layered functions, in relation to bottom-up stimuli. And yet, theatrical performances are ways that the Other, as well as the individual, may change. A culture can explore extended possibilities of Symbolic and Imaginary shifts in situation, context, and sensation, using a collective dreamlike space. This may also involve divine and demonic characterizations of top-down or bottom-up forces, experienced in nature, in the body and brain, or in social networks. Lacan's three orders relate not only to the brain's anatomy, but also to cognitive psychologist Merlin Donald's theory about the evolutionary stages of cultural development in our hominid ancestors. About two million years ago, early hominids evolved beyond the "episodic" experience of other animals (and prior australopithecines)— with the "mimetic" stage of human evolution.3 Donald cites the evidence of increasing brain size in our hominid ancestors,-' the first stone tools, big game hunting, a more group-oriented way of life, and thus "a cultural strategy for remembering and problem solving" (Mind 261).' Instead of being "immersed in a stream of raw episodic experience, from which they ... [could not] gain any distance," early hominids developed a new cognitive capacity, "mimetic skill, which was an extension of conscious control into the domain of action. It enabled playacting, body language, precise imitation, and gesture" (120, 261). This also included prosody, which is processed today in the brain's right hemisphere: "deliberately raising and lowering the voice, and producing imitations of emotional sounds. About a half million years ago, archaic Homo sapiens gradually evolved a "mythic" stage of culture and brain development, culminating with the emergence of our own subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, about 125,000 years ago (Donald, Mind 261). The mythic stage is evidenced by a much higher rate of innovation than in prior hominids: sophisticated tools, "beautifully crafted objects, improved shelters and hearths, and elaborate graves" (261-62). This stage included oral traditions of language and narrative thought — beyond the gesture, mime, and imitation of prior mimetic hominids, or the basic awareness and event sensitivity of episodic primates (260)." It thus involved a fundamental change in the human brain (and vocal tract): an "invasion" of the left parietal lobe by language, replacing spatial perception and movement, which then became a more distinctive function of the right parietal lobe (LcDoux, Synaptic 303, 318).40 Donald's mythic stage shows the evolution of the Symbolic order of mind and society, as well as our current left hemisphere functions. The mimetic stage correlates to right brain processing and the Lacanian Imaginary. Today's human brains also bear the remnant animal emotions and drives of primal episodic awareness in the limbic system and brainstem, as a lost yet disruptive Real or chora*1 Indeed, each child moves through similar developmental stages, recapitulating hominid phylogeny: from primal episodic awareness to the mimetic "interlinking of the infant's attentional system with those of other people" and then to narrative speech (Donald, Mind 255). Or, in Lacanian terms, a child moves from the Real of natural being to the Imaginary order of mirrored illusions of ego in the (m)Others desires and then, through verbal language, to the Symbolic order of superego incorporation, with the Others discourse and social rules, via the Name and No of the Father. This basic outline of Lacanian orders, brain anatomy, and hominid evolution shows that "theatre" (and dance) in the most primal sense — as Imaginary, mimetic performance —began about two million years ago. At that time, our ancestors developed a new skill that eventually became specialized in the visuospatial, prosodic, Imaginary functions of the right hemisphere, with ties to the emotional/instinctual Real of the limbic system and brain- stem. Later hominids developed oral language and myth-making, as further Symbolic orders, through distinct areas of the left brain about a half million years ago. As with the modern child's development from primary to higher- order consciousness, through the Real and Imaginary dimensions of the mirror stage and the later Symbolic acquisition of language and rules, these layers of the brain and of hominid culture continue to interact today — with each human being transformed by a particular family and society. As Donald points out, primal mimesis in early hominids relates not only to the current playacting of children (Mind 266), but also to the "many institutionalized versions of pretend play in theater and him, and [to the] imaginative role playing [that] is integral to adult social life" (263). A crucial aspect of this evolutionary skill is emotional regulation, which involves the germ of self-consciousness, through a "mimetic controller" in the brain, "a whole-body mapping capacity ... under unified command" (269). Thus, early hominids developed larger frontal lobes, setting the stage for the later evolution of a distinctive left hemisphere (271).'15 Like children today (starting with the Imaginary dimension of the Lacanian mirror stage), our hominid ancestors developed a "kinematic imagination" with the physical "image of self" becoming an anchor to experience and awareness (273). This involved rhythmic body movements, expressing temporal relations, through the intersubjective medium of performance, as a "public theatre of convention" (272-74). However, the full emergence of theatre as narrative performance began with oral storytelling during the hominid "mythic" stage, starting about a half million years ago. Then, about forty thousand years ago, humans evolved a further, "theoretic" stage, through the "externalization of memory ... [using] symbolic devices to store and retrieve cultural knowledge" (Donald, Mind2G2). During this current stage of hominid evolution, the tradition of recorded theatre and drama developed, along with other artistic technologies,44 a "Symptom" of being human that has vastly expanded in recent centuries.45 Thus, theatre in the theoretic sense may have started with Paleolithic cave art (as considered in the first chapter). Eventually, the theoretic technologies of theatre, externalizing and interconnecting the performance elements of the human brain, developed in various ways through different cultures — culminating in the current globalism 01 virtual media screens, often dominated by Western paradigms. Our theoretic stage with its evolving technologies continues to reshape the skills of prior stages and "liberate consciousness from the limitations of the brains biological memory systems" (305). However, such an external memory field can also be a "Trojan Horse," Donald warns, "a device that invades the innermost personal spaces of the mind. It can play our cognitive instrument, directing our minds toward predetermined end states along a set course" (316). Such a Trojan Horse potential, with good and evil effects, becomes even more significant through divine characters and godlike ideals, at various points in Western history, from stage to screen performances, as explored throughout this book. Donald's stages of cognitive psychology match with Stephen Mithens archeological theories and research.4fl According to Mithen, the early hominid social intelligence of Homo erectus> 1.6 million years ago, involved the communication of "contentment, anger or desire" through a "wide range of sounds (Prehistory 144) —as with the mimetic prosody theorized by Donald. Human verbal language with "a vast lexicon and a set of grammatical rules" began 500,000 to 200,000 years ago, with Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens, as evidenced by brain and throat structure, indicated in fossils of their bones (140-42, 208). This corresponds to Donald's mythic stage of hominid evolution. Mithen also cites archeological evidence that a dramatic shift occurred 40,000 years ago. Early humans in the Upper Paleolithic period changed from having separate types of intelligence—natural history intelligence (such as interpreting animal hoofprints), social intelligence (with intentional communication), and technical intelligence (producing artifacts from mental templates) — to a new cognitive fluidity between them, creating artifacts with "symbolic meanings ... i.e. art" (163-65).47 This shows the begin- ning of Donald's theoretic stage and relates to the possible shamanic visions and performances evidenced by Paleolithic cave art.48 The evolutionary stages, neurological layers, and psychoanalytic orders of self and Other awareness, developing through shared cultural performances, reflect what might be called an "inner theatre" of the brain.49 By this, I do not mean a "Cartesian theatre" with the mind inside the brain as a single ghostly spectator watching the machinery of inner scenes, or as a play-wright-homunculus inhabiting a central control area (the pineal gland, according to Descartes. 400 years ago). This theory has been fully critiqued by cognitive philosophers, from Gilbert Rylc to Daniel Dennett, as well as by current neurological evidence. However, cognitive scientist Bernard Baars uses theatrical terms in other ways to explain the global workspace of human consciousness. Less than 10 percent of brain activity is conscious, like a "spot- light" on the visible actors and scenery (Theater 46-47).5 The rest involves unconscious agents, like a legislative "audience," competing and collaborating to focus attention on particular perceptions and ideas onstage. There are Deep Goal and Conceptual Contexts, like "backstage" workers, as well as immediate expectations and intentions, forming an unconscious sense of self as "director" of the brains inner theatre (144-45).52

Requisite to the process of both facing our existential fear and mourning for loss of attachment to the status quo, consequently, may be abandoning all hope for redemption within the bounds of a capitalist political economy. In The Courage of Hopelessness, Žižek (2017) draws on the example of a smoker who promises to quit in the future to illustrate the problem of a politics based in hope. As he explains this dilemma, “My awareness that I can stop smoking any time I want guarantees that I will never actually do it—the possibility of stopping smoking is what blocks the actual change; it allows me to accept our continuous smoking without bad conscience, so that the end of smoking is constantly present as the very source of its continuation” (Žižek 2017: ix). It is this promise of future change, in other words, that allows one to disavow one’s inability to actually change in the present. In a similar way, neoliberal conservation can be seen to offer hope for capitalism’s eventual transformation into a sustainable form, allowing us to continue to engage in (inevitably) unsustainable capitalist practices in the (continually extended) here and now by reassuring ourselves that these will be compensated for in a “net zero” future. As with Žižek’s smoker, then, in neoliberal conservation “the possibility of change is evoked to guarantee that it will not be acted upon” (2017: x).

In addressing this dilemma, Žižek contends, “It is only when we despair and don’t know any more what to do that change can be enacted—we have to go through this zero point of hopelessness” (2017: x). Hence, he concludes that “true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction” (Žižek 2017: xi–xii). The train in this case, I have argued, is neoliberal capitalism; hence, escape from the tunnel is only attainable by traversing the neoliberal fantasy entirely in pursuit of a wholly different social reality.

To the extent that critique remains useful in its own right, however, a Lacanian perspective reminds us that it must be approached in a particular way. Acknowledging the implications of the public secrecy dynamic discussed in previous chapters, Žižek echoes Taussig in cautioning that “we must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality. We can see why Lacan, in his seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, distances himself from the liberating gesture of saying finally that ‘the emperor has no clothes’ ” (1989: 25). Rather, Žižek suggests, the aim of critique must be “to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility” (1989: 143), to undertake a “symptomal reading” that seeks to “to discern the unavowed bias of the official text via its ruptures, blanks, and slips” (1997: 10). Or as Kapoor (2005: 1205) paraphrases, “this means tracking and identifying ideology’s Real—its slips, disavowals, contradictions, ambiguities.”

In other words, this Lacanian stance challenges the conventional approach to critique often termed the “education model of social change,” entailing a conviction that provision of more facts concerning the realities of a situation will lead to greater awareness of the problem and, in turn, more effective action (cf. Weintrobe, 2013a). Yet a growing body of research in behavioral economics, social psychology, and related fields demonstrates what psychoanalysts have long asserted, namely that human behavior deviates substantially from this ideal and hence that rather than developing greater awareness and commitment to action, subjects often react to new information by becoming more firmly entrenched in their existing perspective (see Lakoff 2009). For psychoanalysts, this is explained by the fact that attachment to the status quo is commonly cemented by the promise of jouissance that it offers. While this jouissance, as previously noted, is rarely unequivocally pleasurable, rather offering pleasure and pain in equal measure, the fleeting pleasure it does provide reinforces commitment via the fantasy that the pain can be overcome and pure pleasure eventually attained.

Such critique of critique has only multiplied in recent years in the face of the increasingly daunting range of social and environmental problems confronting us.3 Yet one must also remain careful not to move too quickly down the path from defining and analyzing problems to prescribing solutions. Despite his expressed opposition to this latter position, even Foucault could not resist the temptation at times, as exemplified by his curious if fleeting celebration of the progressive possibilities of the 1979 Iranian Revolution (e.g., Foucault 1999). With hindsight, it is easy to understand the seduction of this stance. At that historical moment, standing on the brink of the neoliberal onslaught he himself so presciently foretold (Foucault 2008), having witnessed the bitter failure of previous efforts to cast the Soviet Union in a progressive light as well as dissipation of the ’68 euphoria, it must have appeared, as it did to Horkheimer and Adorno (1998: xi) some three decades earlier in the midst of World War II, that humankind “instead of entering into a truly human condition, [was] sinking into a new kind of barbarism” once more. At that point, it would have been difficult not to succumb to the siren song of any movement that might offer a ray of hope in the gathering darkness. Similarly misplaced optimism has afflicted otherwise even-keeled critical analysts time and again, from disavowal of Soviet atrocities by Cold War communist sympathizers to Žižek’s (2008) praise of Chavez’s Venezuela despite growing evidence of that regime’s mounting totalitarian impulses.

Dynamics like these warn us to be wary in our eagerness to start celebrating ostensive alternatives too quickly. Pushing back against this growing trend, Konings, for instance, echoes Foucault in asserting:

Yet mobilizing post-fantasmatic, post-capitalist enjoyment in support of the commons may also require developing a different relationship with one’s own desire and the subjectivity underpinning it. A Lacanian perspective, after all, understands the human subject as fundamentally constituted by an essential “lack.” This is due to the fact that one’s very self-consciousness is the product of a perception of separation between one’s self and the surrounding environment. This self-perception, however, can only ever encompass a fraction of one’s actual being, hence there remains an inevitable disjuncture between what one is and how one perceives oneself to be. As Dolar describes this dynamic, “there is a part of the individual that cannot successfully pass into the subject, an element of ‘pre-ideological’ and ‘presubjective’ materia prima that comes to haunt subjectivity once it is constituted as such” (1993: 75, emphasis in original). It is this essential lack that stimulates subjects’ desire for objects believed capable of resolving it and thereby conferring a sense of wholeness imagined to have been experienced prior to self-awareness and separation. This renders the subject essentially an infinite void that can never be filled, but which it nevertheless strives to fill through pursuit of objects attached to fantasies that it imagines able to confer the desired completeness. And it is this same lack, of course, that capitalism is able to harness so effectively in “sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire” (McGowan 2017: 11) in order to stimulate the ever-increasing production and consumption requisite to capital accumulation. This stimulation reaches its epitome with the neoliberal “achievement-subject” described by Han (2017), bent on perpetual advancement and optimization. In this way, Lacan suggested, stimulation of “surplus enjoyment” and appropriation of “surplus value” go hand in hand (see Žižek 1989).

This understanding of the subject means that one can never be wholly satisfied through attainment of any particular object (or anything else), but only through acknowledgment, paradoxically, that total satisfaction is unattainable and hence that partial satisfaction of an infinite longing is the best one can ever hope to achieve. After all, for Lacanians, the supposed state of primordial wholeness (Jouissance) that subjects seek to recapture via pursuit of jouissance is itself considered illusory, yet another “fantasmatic construction” sustaining the misperception that “there was once a time or space before lack” (McMillan 2008: 22). This is because attaining such a state would require erasure of the very self-awareness through which it is perceived.

But even in this ambivalent setting, the digital commons provide an opportunity to step away, even partially, from the capitalist value system, a glimpse on “’the outside’, the ‘other than capital’” (De Angelis, 2007: 13). In digital commoning we can observe value practices that do not necessarily justify market exchange as the sole mechanism of living and livelihood creation. People contribute to a collective productive effort that does not result in commodities exchanged in markets. They produce digital commons in the form of knowledge, such as in Wikipedia; code, such as FOSS; and design, such as open hardware projects. It is commons rather than commodities that characterize the effort expended in production. Digital commoners are driven by diverse motivations rather than the sole purpose of realizing market exchange. They, thus, develop value practices, i.e., actions, processes, and webs of relations, around the commons. In the most successful cases, to a certain extent and under certain conditions, they can co-produce their livelihoods through the commons (Pazaitis et al., 2017a; Pazaitis, 2020). Commons-based practices define the principles and structures shared among the participants and are, in turn, reproduced through digital commons projects. They create conditions of “counter-enclosures” (De Angelis, 2007), allowing the production of commons to survive within the capitalist value system as they transcend it. Innovations fostered by digital commons projects played a key role in creating this alternative space. These were process and organizational innovations, such as the wiki platform powering Wikipedia or the forms of modular design and low-cost integration featured in FOSS projects (Benkler, 2002). Adding to that, a series of institutional innovations, such as the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons license family, ensured the reproduction of the digital commons co-created by communities and facilitated the expansion of the ecosystem (Harhoff and Lakhani, 2016; Mateos-Garcia and Steinmueller, 2008). Even if they fostered new models for acquisition and exchange, the innovations of digital commons communities were not driven by acquisition and exchange. Simultaneously, they created the conditions for a different set of principles compared to the ones traditionally associated with innovation to come into place. As a result, there is a potential break in the dominant understanding of innovation as the spearhead of capitalism, which places the concept in a dialectical relation with the commons-based value practices. The currently dominant view of innovation is indispensably connected with the capacity to exploit technological change into the market (Pansera and Fressoli, 2021). This view is largely connected with Schumpeter’s work (1934; 1954), which is saturated with Sombart’s understanding of the capitalist spirit (Reinert and Reinert, 2006; Reinert, 2019). The latter is represented by economic rationality, summarized as the attitude of a systematic pursuit of profit, as Weber (2013) framed it (along with the ultimate, but later forgotten, goal of salvation). This view of innovation has its roots in the Renaissance, with the rational pursuit of profit as a virtue incorporated within exploration and the creation of new possibilities (Reinert and Reinert, 2011). Innovation embodies the transition from the medieval to the Renaissance perception of the human person. It signifies the act of creation in the image of God as inherently virtuous, a duty even, that was hitherto considered serious heresy (Reinert and Reinert, 2011; Reinert and Daastøl, 1997). Today this quest of exploration and creation of new possibilities has been largely delegated to market selection processes. Indeed, the “heretical” activity that would need to be stifled by something like the Spanish Inquisition would be to conceive a form of innovation that challenges the market orthodoxy. The digital commons have managed to exhibit the fittest and strongest forms in several key domains of the digital economy without primarily relying on markets’ selection mechanism or the profit drive. Rather, they created structures that harness diverse motivations, backgrounds, and experiences of an “enormous pool of human creativity and willingness to engage in intellectual effort” (Benkler, 2002: 30). In this sense, the digital commons provide a snapshot of a tentative paradigm shift of innovation predicated on the commons. This transcending dimension of the commons in innovation processes has been inferred by the “innovation commons” (Allen and Potts, 2016; Potts, 2017). Innovation commons relate to opportunities for discovery and experimentation that take place at the early stages of technological development where self-organized groups of people pool distributed knowledge and information resources based on shared rules. The innovation commons showcase the importance of the commons in innovation but restrain the scope of commoning practices to the early stages of innovative processes. Even more, commoning in these stages is largely justified on the degree of uncertainty deeming other forms of coordination too costly (Allen and Potts, 2016). Once the economic returns have been defined, innovation as we know it is validated solely by market success, or, very often, domination. But this outcome, as we analyzed earlier, is not so much a “natural” order of the markets or embedded in human nature. It is a type of order bestowed upon economic agents by the underlying value system and the relevant institutions serving it.

The concept of the commons and its cognates (e.g., “the common” and “commoning”) have acquired wide currency in the critical social sciences and humanities as resources for thinking about social and ecological aspects of life outside the constraints of methodological individualism (Federici; Hardt and Negri; Ostrom). At the most general level, the commons describes a deep condition of ontological entanglement, a collective relationality that exists “prior to any individual’s wealth-making” or, indeed, any sense of bounded individuality whatsoever (Cintron 170). In a more concrete context, the commons refers to the diverse range of material processes on Planet Earth (from fields and forests to open-source software platforms and cooperatively managed factories) that enable the (re)produc-tion of life and that can be oriented toward a horizon of interdependence and mutual flourishing through practices of collective governance. Rhetorical scholars have taken up the commons to address questions of rhetorical agency within contemporary capitalism (Greene), the prospects of citizenship in the age of mass surveillance and “big data” (Boyle 271), the creation of resistant knowledge commons that challenge contemporary practices of surveillance (Chaput and Hanan, “Wikileaks”), the “interdependent productivity” of expertise in the digital commons (Hartelius 2), and the ethical and political tensions inherent in humanity’s responsibility toward a more-than-human world (Conley and Mullen). Despite being engaged along several important trajectories within rhetorical studies, a robust rhetorical theory of the commons has yet to fully emerge.This essay provides such a theory by developing a materialist perspective that conceptualizes the common weave of earthly existence in terms of affective-rhetorical systems: provisionally stable patterns of relation that arise, performatively, out of an ontological fabric of entanglement. From the perspective of affective-rhetorical systems, traditional binaries assumed by many scholars in rhetorical studies (e.g., nature/culture; nonhuman/human; private/public; material/symbolic) are untenable because they all emerge out of common material processes that iteratively (re)produce reality in specific, situated ways. An affective-rhetorical systems perspective, thus, calls into question the human exceptionalism of dominant forms of Euro-Western modernity (and of rhetorical studies in particular) by beginning with an ontological approach to the “deep commons” (Cintron 164) that privileges the more-than-human “rhetoricity of existence as such” (Davis 197). At the same time, by considering the ways the deep commons are provisionally stabilized through historically specific boundary-making practices that actualize certain capacities of relation to the world at the expense of others, our perspective affords new insights into the rhetorical operations of capitalism and strategies of commoning that hold the possibility of resisting capitalism. Building on rhetorical scholarship that conceptualizes capitalism as “an ecological environment to nurture particular affec-tive capacities” (Chaput 32) and that is parasitic on social relationality (Greene), an affective-rhetorical systems perspective shows how capitalism tends to exhaust the capacities of the deep commons through the deployment of frontiers that continually economize its “vulnerable complexity and diversity” (Stormer and McGreavy 19). One frontier that is particularly important to this process is a performatively enacted split between nature and society that figures “nature” as a set of exploitable raw materials for production, while treating “society” as agentic, humanized, and structured through market logics. Likewise, an affective-rhetorical systems perspective shows how the commons is never only legible through the accounting mechanisms of capital and state. Instead, it functions as a reservoir of rhetorical invention that is actualized through systemic practices of commoning capable of valuing the diversity of the deep commons.Our approach to the commons and capital contributes to important ontological as well as political conversations within rhetorical studies by showing how the collective, entangled dimensions of rhetoric’s materiality that scholars have theorized in terms of the “rhetoricity” of the deep commons (Cintron; Davis 197), and as a “politics of living labor” (Greene 203), are actualized through rhetorical practices of commoning that foster affective capacities for mutual flourishing. In part because of its ontological scope, critics of the commons have dismissed it as “mystical claptrap” (Cloud et al. 79), questioning whether it can effectively ground rhetorics of emancipation. Considering capital and commoning as distinct affective-rhetorical performances that foster and foreclose different capacities for collective life enables an account of how ontological registers of the deep commons translate into practices of resistance and solidarity with the potential to generate more ecologically and socially resilient forms of collective life.In insisting on the commons as a concept that foregrounds the entanglements between human and nonhuman scales of reality, our project also offers a way to overcome the bifurcation between theories of rhetoric’s more-than-human dimensions and various critical rhetorical orientations, largely cen-tered on the human, that aim to challenge social injustices. Much rhetorical scholarship on the nonhuman produced thus far either explicitly or implicitly identifies as “post-critical,” approaching rhetoric’s materiality in ways that are “flat and associative rather than hierarchical and reductive” (Walsh and Boyle 3), and privileging thick, local, “micro-rhetorical” description over critical evalua-tions that encompass larger, systemic scales (Pflugfelder 444). For example, in their discussion of aquaculture in Frenchman Bay, Maine, Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy advocate “bypass-[ing] . . . rhetoric of and about the material,” which in their account includes discussions of “property values . . . ocean acidification . . . and unsustainable harvesting practices,” in order to engage the place- specific entanglements of “clams, harvester, hoe, water” and the other actants that compose Frenchman Bay (4). While some of these authors, including Stormer and McGreavy, leave their perspectives open to a further account of different registers of power, many accounts of rhetoric centered on nonhuman materiality actively distance themselves from more critical materialist tradi-tions, contrasting critical materialisms’ “human-centered and overwhelmingly discursive priority” with perspectives that “consider . . . material environments or objects as having . . . agency . . . in their own right” (Rickert 21–22; see also Pflugfelder 447).