Reformism fails—empirics

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Theorizing Capitalism and its Demise.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 27-28. // QUEERMAID

A third option, which breaks with both the autonomist and anarchist frameworks, is to embrace the state as an instrumental actor in liberating and then harnessing the commons to bring about a seismic shift out of capitalism. This mostly reformist approach is well captured in the work of Paul Mason (2016), who views the potential of a scarcity-busting freed general intellect primarily through the lens of state-based leadership and command. Mason’s focus therefore quickly turns to the need for large government driven programmes involving the breaking up of monopolies and targeted nationalizations, hi-tech macroeconomic planning, debt management, and a top-down effort to tackle climate change. In taking this position, however, the bottom-up impetus of commons-based peer production, where ‘the state’ is generally viewed with a good deal of scepticism, is mostly abandoned. Instead, Mason falls back to a politics and economics that are largely in line with standard democratic-socialist discourses. While this direction is probably the most likely to be adopted by leftist politicians and parties today, it also has its share of serious pitfalls. Autonomist and anarchist scholars of the commons, for instance, adamantly argue that the state is hopelessly intertwined with the dictates of capital, forming a capital state nexus that renders any vision of a state-led evolution out of capital an unrealistic fantasy. A further and more immediate challenge, however, especially considering its more mainstream, change-from-within outlook, is that socialist discourses are largely failing to garner the electoral support they would need to pursue the envisioned unleashing of the commons. This is likely the result of these discourses having increasingly lost touch with the changes taking place in capitalism and the subsequent shift in the workforce and labour’s self-perception. The failure of socialist parties, organizations, and unions to prevent the eroding of the middle class amidst widespread deindustrialization undoubtedly has also played a role. In this sense a general scepticism has set in towards the idea of ‘the state’ as a representative of the people’s will, reflecting to some extent the anarchist/autonomist position noted earlier. Within this context, then, it should not be surprising that the increasingly dominant post baby-boom generation finds itself largely unconvinced by suggestions of shifting economic control from capital to the state, that is, exchanging one distant, hierarchically organized form of decision making with another. In Europe this generational attitude is reflected in the plummeting of traditional party membership and, more particularly, the broad implosion of the socialist left, where, with a few exceptions, neither moderate nor more radical leftist parties can gain much electoral traction (van Haute, 2011; Taylor, 2018). In the US, in turn, while younger adults appear to be warming somewhat to the term ‘socialism’ (the term is generally not defined in polls), there is, at the same time, a deep lack of confidence in government in general (Jones and Saad, 2019; Pew, 2021). Given these trends and attitudes, rooted in the reality of a capital-state nexus that takes more than an election to overcome, it is difficult to see how a post-capitalist political economy could effectively spawn from a big-government, socialist platform.