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Second, intensive examination is caught in a Mobius trap, highlighting the tension between the increased workload due to intensive examination and human resource constraints. Chen argues that the USPTO’s enhanced quality review initiative and productivity-promoting count system generated an unexpected rise in the number of continuing applications and ex parte appeals.Footnote 197 In addition, this combination led to increased examiner attrition due to unpaid overtime.Footnote 198 Such trends are held responsible for raising examiners’ workload and backlog.Footnote 199

Similar circumstances are also evident in the EPO, although one study finds that the EPO offers a better fee structure in comparison to the USPTO, and is therefore more likely to maintain a rigorous examination and high quality standard.Footnote 200 It is argued that the extensive “production pressure” imposed by the EPO’s policy prevents at least some examiners from thoroughly examining applications.Footnote 201 This is hardly surprising, as patent examination is a labor-intensive endeavor.Footnote 202

Some leftist economists like Mariana Mazzucato argue that governments might be able to step in and become laboratories for innovation. But that would be a historical anomaly; socialist-leaning governments have typically been less innovative than others. After all, bureaucrats and worker-corporate boards have little incentive to upset the status quo or compete to build a better widget. And even when government programs have spurred innovation—as in the case of the internet—it took the private sector to recognize the value and create a market.

And that brings us to a third reason to believe in markets: productivity. Some economists, such as Robert Gordon, have looked to today’s economic problems and suggested that productivity growth—the engine that fueled so much of the progress of the last several decades—is over. In this telling, the resources, products, and systems that underpin the world’s economy are all optimized, and little further progress is possible.

Jesus Huerta, 5-28-10, “Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship,” Mises, https://mises.at/static/literatur/Buch/huerta-de-soto-socialism-economic-calculation-and-entrepreneurship.pdf

Socialism patently entails an assault on human creativity and hence on society and the advancement of civilization. In fact, to the extent that the free exercise of human action is forcibly impeded via coercive commands, actors are unable to create or discover new information, and the advancement of civilization is blocked. To put it another way, socialism implies the systematic establishment of a series of barriers to free human interaction, and these barriers freeze the development of society. This effect is felt in all areas of social development, not just in those which are strictly economic. One of the most typical characteristics of the socialist system is its slowness to innovate and to introduce current technological innovations, and as a consequence, socialist systems invariably trail behind their competitors in the development and practical application of new technologies.31 This is so even though socialists, in an extensive and voluntaristic manner as always, strive to force society’s technological development by issuing commands and creating pretentious institutes or councils devoted to scientific research and to planning the future development of new technologies. Nevertheless, the very creation of these bureaucratic agencies for the development of innovations is the clearest and most obvious sign that the system is blocked with respect to scientific and technological development. The fact is, it is impossible to plan the future development of knowledge which has not yet been created and can only emerge in an environment of entrepreneurial liberty that commands cannot simulate.

One of the advantages for innovation in DPS is that it can effectively take into account social and environmental costs, including the jobs lost or disrupted by the introduction of a new technology.8 But this can also be problematic, in that it is likely to make innovation slower in socialism than in capitalism. Democratic majorities are not immune to some of the same factors that caused Soviet managers to be technologically conservative.

On the one hand, DPS should not suffer from taut planning, unrealistic plan targets imposed from the top down, or an incentive structure that discourages risk-taking by trying out new technologies. But on the other hand, innovation is always disruptive in any kind of economic system. As old technologies are superseded, product lines become obsolete and production processes are changed, and as a result certain kinds of jobs are no longer needed. Even with an employment guarantee, the loss of one’s job may have to involve retraining, changing careers, or moving across the country. So, it is reasonable to expect that workers will resist new technologies.9 Yet at the same time, in their capacity as consumers, they will demand new and better products.

Another offered reason not to dismiss Marxism is the advancing notion that artificial intelligence can actually make Marxist economics work. The algorithm as central planner extraordinaire. As some on the left see it, the digital revolution will allow AI-equipped technocrats to solve the “calculation problem” of economic allocation in a system of distorted or absent prices, the best system known for aggregating dispersed information. As Hayek wrote in his “The Use of Knowledge in Society” essay:

The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a coördinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible.

Are we better prepared for a new way of doing things? Time will tell if the reassessment of the priorities of public administrations and societies that occurred in the pandemic has lasting effect. The measures imposed to tackle the health emergency accelerated processes of economic and social transformation. Readjustments may occur when it comes to teleworking, but the change of habits that has taken place in mobility, consumption and information processing and the intensive process of learning digital tools will be difficult to reverse. Another of the legacies of the health crisis has been the focus on science. Ostensibly contradictory phenomena have emerged. Science’s social prestige has grown (the latest global State of Science Index (SOSI) suggests that 79% of people believe that science will improve life in the next five years), but so have the dynamics of politicisation and contestation mentioned above.

If this trend continues it may have a densifying effect, with more collaboration projects between research teams, alliances forming between public administrations, scientists and the private sector, and a closer relationship between the public and science. Meanwhile, science budgets will be notably larger: the Next Generation EU funds allocate 37% and 20% to financing the green and digital transitions, respectively, while the US stimulus plans will spend $250 billion on innovation.

Is war becoming obsolete? There is wide agreement among scholars that war has been in sharp decline since the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, even as there is little agreement as to its cause.1 Realists reject the idea that this trend will continue, citing states' concerns with the “security dilemma”: that is, in anarchy states must assume that any state that can attack will; therefore, power equals threat, and changes in relative power result in conflict and war.2 Discussing the rise of China, Graham Allison calls this condition “Thucydides's Trap,” a reference to the ancient Greek's claim that Sparta's fear of Athens' growing power led to the Peloponnesian War.3

This article argues that there is no Thucydides Trap in international politics. Rather, the world is moving rapidly toward permanent peace, possibly in our lifetime. Drawing on economic norms theory,4 I show that what sometimes appears to be a Thucydides Trap may instead be a function of factors strictly internal to states and that these factors vary among them. In brief, leaders of states with advanced market-oriented economies have foremost interests in the principle of self-determination for all states, large and small, as the foundation for a robust global marketplace. War among these states, even making preparations for war, is not possible, because they are in a natural alliance to preserve and protect the global order. In contrast, leaders of states with weak internal markets have little interest in the global marketplace; they pursue wealth not through commerce, but through wars of expansion and demands for tribute. For these states, power equals threat, and therefore they tend to balance against the power of all states. Fearing stronger states, however, minor powers with weak internal markets tend to constrain their expansionist inclinations and, for security reasons, bandwagon with the relatively benign market-oriented powers.

Proponents of degrowth argue that there are absolute “planetary limits” and a fixed “carrying capacity” that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. This is not only pessimistic in that it dismisses the idea that, under socialism, we could figure out new sustainable ways to grow, but it’s also completely devoid of class analysis. There’s no distinction between socially-produced limits and natural limits.

Degrowth is anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-large scale production and infrastructure. Kallis argues that “only social systems of limited size and complexity can be governed directly rather than by technocratic elites acting on behalf of the populace… Many degrowth advocates, therefore, oppose even ‘green’ megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms[!]” [13]. 

Another question that is all too rarely asked is: What would be the price of eliminating inequality? In 2017, the renowned Stanford historian and scholar of ancient history Walter Scheidel presented an impressive historical analysis of this question: The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. He concludes that societies that have been spared mass violence and catastrophes have never experienced substantial reductions in inequality.

Substantial reductions in inequality have only ever been achieved as the result of violent shocks, primarily consisting of war, revolution, state failure and systems collapse, and plague.

Obi Peter Adigwe and Davidson Oturu, “The role of patent waivers and compulsory licensing in facilitating access to COVID-19 vaccines: Findings from a survey among healthcare practitioners in Nigeria,” PLOS Global Public Health, 7 July 2022, https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0000683.

Although majority of the participants in this study agreed that patents are targeted at promoting inventions, their responses appear to be affected by their level of education. The respondents were however in consensus that waiving intellectual property rights can increase access to COVID-19 vaccines. This is an important finding to help address vaccine inequality which has occurred as a result of vaccine nationalism and scramble by developed countries [19]. TRIPS agreement was made in order to protect intellectual property rights, however, it was observed that the agreement had some shortcomings especially in the promotion of access to medicines. It would appear that the lacuna TRIPS agreement left was initially filled during the Doha Declaration [20, 21]. This declaration was adopted by the WTO Ministerial Conference two decades ago in Doha and it reaffirmed flexibility of TRIPS member states in circumventing patent rights for better access to essential medicines. The Doha Declaration sheds light on two mechanisms that can be used in emergencies to facilitate access to medicines, which include patent waiver and compulsory licensing of pharmaceutical products.

We have here something a bit like the old “reform or revolution” dichotomy, which arrays the advocates of smashing the existing system against the timid meliorism of those who only want to make it more humane. But the contrast fails here just as it did in the larger drama of twentieth-century socialism, where revolution and reform both ultimately led back to capitalist restoration and neoliberal retrenchment. We need another path — one that recognizes the necessity of reformist struggles within capitalist institutions, while still attempting to move toward a break with the system and the creation of a fundamentally new kind of economy and society. André Gorz called this the “non-reformist reform”: a project of “reforms which advance toward a radical transformation of society” by making a “modification of the relations of power” which could “serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints.”

What would constitute a non-reformist reform of intellectual property? The revolutionary overthrow of all intellectual property, even if it were possible, leaves unanswered the question of how to ensure that those who create knowledge and culture are provided for, and how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists. The anarchist championing of online piracy only allows for some resistance around the edges, without posing a fundamental challenge to the system. And yet the idea of reforming IP into something better and more egalitarian, something that truly rewards all who participate in the work of creation, seems like another iteration of the naïve dream of a just and democratic capitalism.

Any criticism presupposes the possibility of a better way of life; to expose something as illusory or contradictory is to imply the possibility and desirability of a life without those illusions and contradictions. This much has been established by critical theorists such as Habermas and Apel. Yet the notion that critique implies a quest for the good is a highly abstract one. Up to a point, particular critiques do imply something a little more specific than the standpoint of a better life. The critique of capitalism's anarchic and uneven development implies a critical standpoint or contrast space of an imagined society with a rationally ordered and even process of development. The critique of class points to the desirability of a classless society. Naturally, society would be better if its illusions, conflicts and contradictions were reduced, but we naturally want to know how this could be achieved. The desirability of a life without contradictions or illusions does not make it feasible.

Critical social science does not merely identify illusions, irrationality or contradictions but attempts to provide explanations of their sources, locating the 'unwanted determinations' of behaviour, as Bhaskar (1989) puts it. It would be strange, to say the least, if an analysis of the causes of problems such as hunger and exploitation were unable to indicate anything about alternatives which would eliminate them. If a critical theory cannot begin to indicate how to eliminate problems we must inevitably be suspicious of its claims to have identified their causes. If the alternative implied by a critical standpoint is not feasible, then any critique made from that standpoint is thereby seriously weakened. Not to put too fine a point on it, the critique of, say, capitalism's anarchic and uneven development would lose much of its force if all [END PAGE 33] advanced economies were necessarily anarchic and uneven in their development, though one could still criticize advanced economies - not just capitalist ones - from the very different standpoint of a 'deep ecology', calling for a return to small-scale, more primitive economies (Dobson, 1990).

The desire to anticipate what the future holds is not new. The Delphic oracle in the eighth century BC held a prestigious and authoritative position in the Greek world, providing predictions and guidance to both city-states and individuals. In 1555, Nostradamus’ Les Propheties attracted an enthusiastic following, and even today many credit him with predicting many major world events. During the Cold War, techniques designed to anticipate the future were instrumental in informing strategic decisions. Analysts at the RAND Corporation, for example, pioneered the development of foresight methods such as scenario development to predict the Soviet Union’s nuclear strategy during the Cold War in their seminal 1988 report, “How Nuclear War Might Start”. However, just as the Cold War ended, so too did the close relationship between foresight and nuclear weapons. Other sectors utilized and expanded upon futures methods in their work. The most well-known example is the use of scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell, which has been in use since the 1970s to better prepare for an eventful decade of oil crises and economic turmoil. The objective of Shell-style scenario planning is breaking the habit of assuming that the future will look much like the present. Today, many parts of the private and public sectors increasingly use strategic foresight to explore the future as part of their decision-making process. In comparison, futures methods are no longer in the mainstream of nuclear policy making, even though nuclear risks are rising. This dearth of strategic foresight in nuclear policy making is dangerous, but fortunately there are some easy remedies. A fundamental challenge faces nuclear policy makers and scholars today: It is now more important than ever to anticipate what the future might hold due to the uncertainty surrounding tomorrow’s strategic environment. Moreover, the inherent—and growing—complexity of systems and new actors has made it increasingly difficult to predict the future simply by extrapolating from the past. Futures methods provide the tools to address this challenge, along with a good dose of humility about how much we can control our world. These methods can help develop foresight—insight into how and why the future could be different than today—which, in turn, helps to improve policy, planning, and decision making, all of which play an integral part in a world with nuclear weapons. We talk about futures in the plural because the objective is not to predict a single future, but to explore alternative futures. By envisioning alternative futures, we can better sense, shape, and adapt to the one that is emerging. Singapore’s foresight practice is an excellent example of how foresight readies us for change. For over 40 years, foresight has helped the Singapore government go beyond prevailing assumptions, better manage risk and uncertainty, and develop greater resilience to possible shocks. Futures methods also help to engender ‘knowledge humility’, where instead of seeking to deny or eliminate uncertainty, we learn to live with it through reflexive governance.

(Andrei V., “Extraction path and sustainability,” Resources Policy 76, Science Direct)

As is known, the prescriptions of IAM, the main tool of climate economy modeling, highly depend on uncertain key parameters such as discount rate or damage functions. As Stern and Stiglitz (2021) put it, ‘‘In the presence of these extreme uncertainties .. .a full analysis is impossible’’. IPCC conclusions induce an additional approach for rough estimates of mitigating policies. The conclusions imply that the perceived quality of life34 for majority of Earth’s population, including the least advantageous, will decline with further growth of global temperature. Since the approach to justice evaluation depends on context (Konow, 2003), the climate context calls for the maximin to mitigate the worst damages while eliminating the most controversial parameter – discount rate – and, again, bringing closer the problem of climate change to the analysis of the current paper.

The concern that some input material will come to an end, and that this crisis will deal a fatal blow to civilization, is a recurrent theme in history. In Britain, the fear was expressed in the age of sail that when the country was depleted of oak, the fundamental wood used in shipbuilding and masts at the time, the country would become defenseless at sea. Clearly, this did not happen; eventually iron replaced the need for wood, and in the meantime, sufficient supplies came through trade with Scandinavia, the Baltics, and North America. For goods that cannot be replaced, prices generate strong incentives to become better at extracting and recycling them.38 Think of copper, which has good properties as an electrical conductor. As electrification was in full swing in the early twentieth century in the United States, geologist and copper-mining expert Ira Joralemon warned that “the age of electricity and of copper will be short. At the intense rate of production that must come, the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years.… Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die.” One century later, we can see that this prediction did not age well.

It is not even a necessity that the bulk of our technological solutions must be based on geological materials. Think, for example, of recent research on fertilizers, based on the discovery that certain bacteria can capture atmospheric nitrogen, without the high pressures and temperatures of the polluting Haber-Bosch process described above. Likewise, the research frontier is shifting toward new materials, opening up the possibility of producing consumer goods with algae-based bioplastic. It would seem that if the twentieth century was characterized by the triumph of inorganic chemistry, the twenty-first might well be the century of organic materials, repurposed to meet human needs. This age is being ushered in by the advent of biotechnology which, also thanks to recent advances like Crispr / Cas9, will provide powerful tools to address current challenges, from reducing the use of pesticides and herbicides in agriculture to fostering natural carbon sequestration.

Today’s best-case ecological scenario was a horror story just three decades ago. In 1993, Bill Clinton declared that global warming presented such a profound threat to civilization that the U.S. would have to bring its “emissions of greenhouse gases to their 1990 levels by the year 2000.” Instead, we waited until 2020 to do so; in the interim, humanity burned more carbon than it had since the advent of agriculture. Now, it will take a historically unprecedented, worldwide economic transformation to freeze warming at “only” 2 degrees — a level of temperature rise that will turn “once in a century” storms into annual events, drown entire island nations, and render major cities in the Middle East uninhabitable in summertime (at least for those whose lifestyles involve “walking outdoors without dying of heatstroke”). This is what passes for a utopian vision in 2021. If we confine ourselves to mere optimism — and assume that every Paris Agreement signatory meets its current pledged target for decarbonization — then warming will hit 2.4 degrees by century’s end. The reality of our ecological predicament invites denial of our political one. Put simply, it is hard to reconcile the scale of the climate crisis with the limits of contemporary American politics. Delusions rush in to fill the gap. Among these is the fantasy of national autonomy; the notion that the United States can save the planet or destroy it, depending on the precise timeline of its domestic decarbonization. A rapid energy transition in the U.S. is a vital cause, not least for its potential to expedite similar transformations abroad. But the battle for a sustainable planet will be won or lost in the developing world. Although American consumption played a central role in the history of the climate crisis, it is peripheral to the planet’s future: Over the coming century, U.S. emissions are expected to account for only 5 percent of the global total. There is also the delusion of “de-growth’s” viability. The fact that there is no plausible path for global economic expansion that won’t entail climate-induced death and displacement has led some environmentalists to insist on global stagnation. Yet there is neither a mass constituency for this project, nor any reason to believe that there will be any time soon. Freeze the status-quo economy in amber, and you’ll condemn nearly half of humanity to permanent poverty. Divide existing GDP into perfectly even slices, and every person on the planet will live on about $5,500 a year. American voters may express a generalized concern about the climate in surveys, but they don’t seem willing to accept even a modest rise in gas prices — let alone a total collapse in living standards — to address the issue. Meanwhile, any Chinese or Indian leader who attempted to stymy income growth in the name of sustainability would be ousted in short order. It’s conceivable that one could radically reorder advanced economies in a manner that enabled living standards to rise even as GDP fell; Americans might well find themselves happier and more secure in an ultra-low-carbon communal economy in which individual car ownership is heavily restricted, and housing, healthcare, and myriad low-carbon leisure activities are social rights. But nothing short of an absolute dictatorship could affect such a transformation at the necessary speed. And the specter of eco-Bolshevism does not haunt the Global North. Humanity is going to find a way to get rich sustainably, or die trying. Thus, the chasm between the ecologically necessary and the politically possible can only be bridged by technological advance. And on that front, the U.S. actually has the resources to make a decisive contribution to global decarbonization — and some political will to leverage those resources. Unfortunately, due to some combination of fiscal superstitions and misplaced priorities, the Biden administration’s proposed investments in green innovation remain paltry. An American Jobs Plan with much higher funding for green R&D is both imminently winnable and environmentally imperative. U.S. climate hawks should make securing such legislation a top priority. The choice before us is techno-optimism or barbarism. If governments are forced to choose between increasing income growth in the present, and mitigating temperature rise in the future, they are going to pick the former. We’ll get cheap, lab-grown Kobe beef before we get a U.S. Senate willing to tax meat, and steel plants powered by “green hydrogen” before we get anarcho-primitivism with Chinese characteristics. The question is whether we’ll get such breakthroughs before it’s too late. Techno-optimism has its hazards, but the progress we’ve made toward decarbonization has come largely through technological innovation. When India canceled plans to construct 14 gigawatts of new coal-fired power stations in 2019, it did not do so in deference to international pressure or domestic environmental movements, but rather to the cost-competitiveness of solar energy. The same story holds across Asia’s developing countries: Thanks to a ninefold reduction in the cost of solar energy over the past decade, the number of new coal plants slated for construction in the region has fallen by 80 percent. Meanwhile, the road to an electric-car revolution was cleared by a collapse in the cost of lithium batteries, the challenge of powering cities with solar energy on cloudy days was eased by a 70 percent drop in the price of utility-scale batteries, and wind power grew 40 percent cheaper. Our species remains lackluster at solidarity and self-government, but we’ve got a real knack for building cool shit. The technological progress of the past decade was not sufficient to compensate for tepid climate policy. But real techno-utopianism has never been tried: As of 2019, global spending on clean energy R&D totaled $22 billion a year, or 3 percent of the Pentagon’s annual budget. Increasing spending on such research — while expediting cost-reductions in existing technologies by deploying them en masse — should be twin priorities of American climate policy. The preconditions for green industrialization can be made in America. The United States has more fiscal capacity and better-financed research universities than any nation on the planet. And, for all the pathologies of our politics, public investment in green tech inspires far weaker opposition than many less-indispensable climate policies. In fact, late last year, with Republicans controlling the Senate and Donald Trump in the White House, the U.S. increased funding for zero-emission technology R&D by $35 billion. America does not have sovereignty over enough humans to save the planet by slashing our domestic emissions. But we just might have the resources and political economy necessary to help the developing world save us all. Although progress on renewables has exceeded optimistic expectations, the technical obstacles to global decarbonization remain immense. In the most optimistic scenario, scaling up existing, cost-competitive technologies can get us about 16 percent of the emissions reductions necessary for achieving net-zero by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Driving down the price of tech we already have will get us another 39 percent. The rest must come from technologies that have yet to be fully developed. We need electrified cement, hydrogen-powered steel plants, and evaporative cooling. We need utility-scale energy storage, electric airplanes, and ultra-high voltage transmission lines. And we’d be remiss to not toss a bit of our collective wealth at game-changing hail marys like nuclear fusion.

Another argument which is often used in favour of permanent accommodation is the threat of extreme authoritarian measures that must be faced by a socialist revolutionary movement. This argument is backed up by emphasizing both the immense destructive power at capital's disposal and the undeniable historical fact that no ruling order ever cedes willingly its position of command over society, using if need be even the most violent form of repression to retain its rule. The weakness of this argument is twofold, despite the factual circumstances which would seem to support it.

First, it disregards that the antagonistic confrontation between capital and labour is not a political/military one in which one of the antagonists could be slaughtered on the battlefield or riveted to chains. Inasmuch as there can be chains in this confrontation, labour is wearing them already, in that the only type of chains compatible with the system must be 'flexible' enough to enable the class of labour to produce and be exploited. Nor can one imagine that the authoritarian might of capital is likely to be used only against a revolutionary socialist movement. The repressive anti-labour measures of the last two decades — not to mention many instances of past historical emergency characterized by the use of violence under the capital system —give a foretaste of worse things to come in the event of extreme confrontations. But this is not a matter of either/or, with some sort of apriori guarantee of a 'fair' and benevolent treatment in the event of labour's willing accommodation and submission. The matter hinges on the gravity of the crisis and on the circumstances under which the antagonistic confrontations unfold. Uncomfortable as this truth may sound to socialists, one of the heaviest chains which labour has to wear today is that it is tied to capital for its continued survival, for as long as it does not succeed in making a strategic break in the direction of a transition to a radically different social metabolic order. But that is even more true of capital, with the qualitative difference that capital cannot make any break towards the establishment of a different social order. For capital, truly, 'there is no alternative' — and there can never be — to its exploitative structural dependency on labour. If nothing else, this fact sets well marked limits to capital's ability to permanently subdue labour by violence, compelling it to use, instead, the earlier mentioned 'flexible chains' against the class of labour. It can use violence with success selectively, against limited groups of labour, but not against the socialist movement organized as a revolutionary mass movement. This is why the development of 'communist mass consciousness' (to use Marx's expression), in contrast to the vulnerability of narrow sectarian orientation, is so important.

In thinking about this, we have to start from where we are, from the many rebellions and insubordinations that have brought us to Porto Alegre. The world is full of such rebellions, of people saying NO to capitalism: NO, we shall not live our lives according to the dictates of capitalism, we shall do what we consider necessary or desirable and not what capital tells us to do. Sometimes we just see capitalism as an all-encompassing system of domination and forget that such rebellions exist everywhere. At times they are so small that even those involved do not perceive them as refusals, but often they are collective projects searching for an alternative way forward and sometimes they are as big as the Lacandon Jungle or the Argentinazo of three years ago or the revolt in Bolivia just over a year ago. All of these insubordinations are characterised by a drive towards self-determination, an impulse that says, ‘No, you will not tell us what to do, we shall decide for ourselves what we must do.’

These refusals can be seen as fissures, as cracks in the system of capitalist domination. Capitalism is not (in the first place) an economic system, but a system of command. Capitalists, through money, command us, telling us what to do. To refuse to obey is to break the command of capital. The question for us, then, is how do we multiply and expand these refusals, these cracks in the texture of domination?

To find a counter-proposition, we need something else, something akin, though not identical, to what Raniero Panzieri enunciated half a century ago, close to the start of the cybernetic era, when he articulated the doctrine of ‘refusal’ that lies at the root of what is known as autonomist Marxism: autonomist precisely in seeking, not the autonomy of capital from humans, but of humans from capital:

[T]he capitalist use of machinery is not, so to speak, a mere distortion of, or deviation from, some ‘objective’ development that is in itself rational, but that capital has determined technological development … that ‘the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour’ are embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master’. Hence, vis-à-vis the ‘voided’ individual worker, technological development presents itself as a development of capitalism: as capital, and ‘because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will’. (Panzieri 2017)

To find a counter-proposition, we need something else, something akin, though not identical, to what Raniero Panzieri enunciated half a century ago, close to the start of the cybernetic era, when he articulated the doctrine of ‘refusal’ that lies at the root of what is known as autonomist Marxism: autonomist precisely in seeking, not the autonomy of capital from humans, but of humans from capital:

[T]he capitalist use of machinery is not, so to speak, a mere distortion of, or deviation from, some ‘objective’ development that is in itself rational, but that capital has determined technological development … that ‘the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour’ are embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master’. Hence, vis-à-vis the ‘voided’ individual worker, technological development presents itself as a development of capitalism: as capital, and ‘because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will’. (Panzieri 2017)