9. Kill the King!

Chess may be useless as a metaphor for international relations but it carries one very important lesson. The only point of the game is to take the opponent’s king. All other moves, and elegant plays with bishop or pawns, are but preliminary to this object. Do not be satisfied with process, but only with results. A campaign to end genocide, richly adorned with expensive video and glamourous celebrities, is worth nothing if it doesn’t save a single life. Don’t campaign for others to perform the action required to achieve change: Do it yourself. Sending a text message or signing an Internet petition is likely to achieve nothing, given that so little went into it.

The measure of any political action is not how many hits you get on the campaign website, how many followers you may have on Twitter, or supporters on your Facebook page. The measure is effects in the real world on the thing you are trying to change: Are there fewer nuclear weapons, has the dictator been overthrown, is one child saved from starvation?

Alexander the Great always aimed his forces at his enemy’s strongest point. When that fell, the enemy collapsed. Kill the King!

Individually, these principles are unexceptionable. Who can object to nonviolent, step-by-step action, negotiated with those affected, and designed to address those most suffering? But taken together, these principles in fact amount to a radically different form of political action from the contemporary cultural model, which seems by contrast to amount to very little: Vote for the government, maybe campaign a little to ask others to do things you want, and, if you’re directly concerned, perhaps lobby government. The principles suggested above offer a rather more vigorous, directed but above all effective, even transformative, course of action. This is perhaps why there is such establishment hostility to these methods, and indeed to the word “anarchism,” including the very peaceful and collaborative form proposed here: The employment of these methods will actually change things, including by changing the way that things change. Those who benefit from the current status quo don’t want you to know that.

One person following these principles will not cause a global revolution, though it may revolutionize their own lives. But the action of one may stimulate others. And if many adopt these principles, a revolution, a leaderless revolution, will eventually become manifest.

9. Conclusion: A Vision of the Human

In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, some of the greatest scenes are those depicting the battles of the Franco-Russian wars. Cannonballs from Napoleon’s artillery whiz overhead, cavalry horses rear and flare at fusillades of musket fire, men quiver with fear and red flows their blood.

In one scene during the Battle of Austerlitz, the Russian troops are taken by surprise by advancing French columns that suddenly emerge from the engulfing fog. As the French fire scatters them, the Russian front collapses and men flee in disarray. Weeping with anger and shame as he contemplates imminent defeat, Prince Andrew picks up a standard that a retreating officer has let fall. Heedless of the danger and the bullets cracking all around him, he gives a cry “piercing as a child’s” and runs forward.[155]

His singular action is enough to rally the disordered infantrymen around him. Suddenly, one soldier moves, and then another, and soon the whole battalion runs forward shouting “Hurrah!” and overtakes him. Surrounded by charging troops, Prince Andrew runs forward, now just twenty paces from the French guns, so close that he sees the fear and anger on the gunners’ faces. Prince Andrew is struck down; others seize the flag to maintain the advance.

The battle is, however, lost. Later, Prince Andrew, now captured, lies gravely wounded in a French dressing station. Napoleon visits the injured Russians. Close to death, Prince Andrew is unmoved by the sight of his erstwhile hero. Looking into Napoleon’s eyes, “Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.” Tolstoy’s battle scenes are of the microcosmic actions upon which pivots victory or defeat. These actions are not the function of the decisions of generals or emperors; they are the contingent decisions of individual officers and soldiers, like the courageous if ultimately futile charge of Prince Andrew. In an earlier chapter, the Battle of Schöngrabern is turned by the decision of one man, Timókhin, to charge the French lines, armed only with a sword. Such actions, almost random in appearance, are for Tolstoy what matters, not grand strategy or great men.

In his seminal essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin analyzed Tolstoy’s view of history. War and Peace, according to Berlin, illustrates Tolstoy’s skepticism of an account that suggested that events were under the control of leaders, states or governments. Such history, Tolstoy believed, accounted for not more than 0.001 percent of human affairs; it was, moreover, basically false. At Austerlitz, the Russian czar and his generals are described standing on a hilltop observing their troops descend into the thick fog enveloping the valley beneath them. It is a figurative illustration of their true knowledge, Tolstoy suggests. The chief Russian general, Kutúzov, enjoys heroic stature in Russian history, but Tolstoy portrays him groaning helplessly as his troops are attacked by surprise. Only Prince Andrew is decisive in response to the emerging catastrophe, and his response is not to issue orders but to seize the fallen flag and advance.

In Tolstoy’s descriptions, real life was far too complex and contingent to be controlled by those at the summit of the pyramid. In fact, they could not be expected to understand it at all, because they were not part of it or close enough to witness it. Those who claimed such understanding were either naive or were claiming knowledge for some other purpose—to wield power, for instance. In fact, as War and Peace shows, it is those at the base of the pyramid who make history, even if they do not know it.

This chimes with our own intuition. Battles are as life: the strange and inconstant mix of circumstance, random events and our own volition. Each is crucial; none is separable. The abstraction from this mix into a linear, polished narrative is inherently false. Equally false is any claim that human action is driven by a singular motive, such as the requirement to “maximize utility,” as some economists would claim. Under scrutiny, any event, however great or small, is revealed as a fantastic and hugely complex mix of influence and causation, some inconsequential, some crucial. There is no base, no bottom to these causes and effects, all are contingent upon others.

Tolstoy’s hostility was directed against those who pretended that history was of great men and their decisions, a depiction he believed fundamentally inaccurate and dishonest. But it is not only historians who must reduce. Governments too are required to aggregate the world’s incredible complexity into simple truths, to take the billions of actions and wishes of their populations and claim that they can be aggregated. This adduces no malign purpose to governments; they have no alternative but to reduce in this way. They are required to do so in order to claim that they understand, in order that they can produce policies and decisions that offer to arbitrate the complexity.

“The Hedgehog and the Fox” is celebrated as a superb analysis of Tolstoy’s writing and historical views. Oddly, however, Berlin does not explore how Tolstoy’s writing, and the view of history intrinsic in it, informed the writer’s politics, instead concentrating on the more mystical aspects of Tolstoy’s thought. For Tolstoy believed that all authority impeded the power of independent action by individuals—and that only the individual had any authentic understanding of their circumstance and how to change it. Tolstoy was an anarchist.

Tolstoy believed that it was those at the base of the pyramid—the foot soldiers on the battlefields of Borodino or Austerlitz—who in fact made history. The “great men” and generals who claimed to understand it had not a clue. For Tolstoy, it was ironic that historians looked to the generals and leaders for the decisions that determined history, rather than the infantry. More ironic still was that the infantrymen did so too.

The dominating thought-systems of the twentieth century hold only fragmentary clues to the necessary remedies today. Communism offered a spurious equality at the sacrifice of individual liberty. Capitalism offers liberty at the expense of social justice, harmony and that essential sense of individual or shared meaning.

But both left and right do, however, offer hints of a new and stronger philosophy. The greatest strength of the right has been its appeal to individual enterprise and self-expression, freed of the deadening burden of government. That of the left is its recognition that we are not separated from one another, that community embraces and succors all, opposing injustice, inequality and a merely selfish and ultimately divisive individualism. We are all better off together.

But both the economic theory underlying capitalism and communist orthodoxy offer a very limited and ultimately negative view of the human. In neoclassical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the satisfaction of their material desires. The ultimate objective of mankind is economic growth, and that is maximized only through raw, and lightly regulated, competition. If the rewards of this system are spread unevenly, that is a necessary price. Others on the planet are to be regarded as either customers, competitors or factors of production. Effects upon the planet itself are mere “externalities” to the model, with no reckoning of the cost—at least for now. Nowhere in this analysis appear factors such as human cooperation, love, trust, compassion or hatred, curiosity or beauty. Nowhere appears the concept of meaning. What cannot be measured is ignored. But the trouble is that once our basic needs for shelter and food have been met, such factors may be the most important of all.

In Marxist theory, the proletariat should eventually be freed of all burdens, including of government. But in practice, all communist systems rapidly established and maintained huge bureaucracies, with their privileged elites, to instruct the people on their best interests. Never were they to be asked what these might be. Those who offered a dissenting voice were repressed, often with great cruelty. In suppressing the anarchists of the Spanish republic, or the Bolsheviks of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, the Communists showed their true colors. Communism could never mean freedom from authority. That revolution would never be permitted. The people were not to be trusted.

The methods discussed here instead imply a different view of mankind. That people can be trusted successfully to manage their own affairs, to negotiate with one another, to regulate their own societies from the bottom up—by moral rules, rather than coercion and punishment. That there is more available than the ugliness, conflict and emptiness of contemporary society. Cynics will argue that such trust is misplaced, and that conflict is inevitable. But the evidence from the few occasions when people have been given true agency over their affairs suggests rather the opposite: respect, consensus, or at worst an acceptance of difference. If all authority disappeared today, our current condition of mistrust and fear would guarantee the “war of all against all.” But the practices offered here would, with time, build trust anew. It even may be built into something never experienced before, something extraordinary and beautiful—a new society, governed by itself.

The preparation of this book has concluded just as something extraordinary has begun. In the Middle East, mass protests have driven dictators from power in Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya, an uprising, with outside military support, has deposed the repressive Gadhafi regime. And in America and Europe, mass popular protest has broken out against the injustice of the current political and economic system. The Occupy Wall Street movement may currently comprise only a few thousand people, but it seems to represent a much wider disillusionment and anger with the status quo. As I write these words, the protests have spread across the United States and Western Europe.

There is a whiff of revolution in the air—and not only in the Middle East. We have perhaps arrived at one of those moments of history where fundamental change becomes possible, as people awaken to the profound injustices, but also incapability, of the current dispensation. In an echo of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts in scientific belief, the old paradigm of politics and economics is appearing more and more inadequate. A new paradigm cries out to emerge.

As this book has argued, protest alone is unlikely to be sufficient when the political system, although ostensibly democratic, has been co-opted by the rich and the powerful. It is implausible to expect such a system to deliver, for instance, necessary banking reform, when banking CEOs enjoy far greater access to the political system than ordinary voters. Just read the newspapers.

Instead, a new system needs to be created. What that system should consist of has been laid out in this book. At Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where the Occupy Wall Street protests are centered, some of the attributes of a new system are already evident.

Instead of a hierarchy, decisions among the protesters are made by consensus. Everyone who wants to gets a chance to speak. Each night, a “general assembly” of the protesters is convened. There are no leaders, but it is organized. And, amazingly, everyone respects the common rules. When one speaks, nobody interrupts. Though the police have banned bullhorns and microphones, across the square other people echo the words of the speaker so that everyone of the hundreds present can listen. Paradoxically, this has had the effect of binding the group more closely together. Even the act of one person speaking is now, thanks to the “human mike” more involving. Astonishingly, it feels like an intimate conversation, but among hundreds of people.

But the drawbacks of this form of protest are also evident. There is no list of demands. No one claims to speak for all the protesters, so there is no single common message save, perhaps, “Enough!” This has confounded many commentators and journalists, accustomed perhaps to more directed and traditional forms of protest. What do you want? they ask. But if one would-be leader were to stand up with a manifesto, others would surely protest that no one has the right to sum up their demands. As I heard one man exclaim, with some passion, “I don’t want anyone to speak for me!”

A more succinct plea for direct involvement in politics and our future could hardly be spoken.

But for such protests to amount to anything, change must be inspired that can be transmitted across the system, and not confined to a few thousand idealists on the streets. It must be change that anyone, with a will, can undertake.

What might this consist of?

The economy can be changed from the inside out by altering the basic model of the company, from privately owned profit-seeking, to cooperative benefit. Cooperative companies, owned by their employes (or, rather, partners) can be both competitive but also fair, and more fulfilling for all involved. They can hardwire justice as part of their construction—for instance, by declaring a commitment that the highest paid employee is paid no more than, say, five times the lowest. By making every worker a partner, they can create an entirely different culture of the workplace, where everyone has a voice—and a stake—in success, in contrast to the latent antagonism between highly paid bosses and minimally paid employes.

Then the choice is for all of us to encourage such companies with our patronage. Thus, this culture, this new way of doing things, can spread, an organic change to the nature of the economy. As cooperative companies multiply, they can form collaborative networks, where business-to-business transactions reinforce the trend, which one day may then become the norm. The genesis of such networks is already visible, in efforts like solidarityNYC.org, a website that lists the many businesses that promote values—sustainability, economic justice—other than mere profit. Already, the site covers a vast range of goods and services, from food basics to financial services. It can be done, but it involves a choice.

Other changes are possible too, though none will come about by the natural forces of the market—or by government legislation.

How might we replace the currently iniquitous and risky financial sector, where risk taking has been insured by the taxpayer but the profits go only to the bankers, a system that is not only grossly unfair, but also has put the entire global economy in jeopardy? In Canada, the third largest national bank is a credit union. Illustrating the stranglehold of the profit-seeking banks on Washington, such a national bank is all but impossible in the U.S., such are the obstacles in federal legislation, the result of intensive and wholly self-interested lobbying by the commercial banks.

But it is not implausible to imagine a cooperatively owned bank that is not only national, but international, and able to reap the economies of scale currently enjoyed only by the big private banks. Cynics will snigger at the idealism of such a venture, but the cynic, as Oscar Wilde once observed, knows only the price of everything, not its value. No one pretends that the challenge is easy, but to imagine it is a start.

It is the same story with politics or, to put it more accurately, the method of deciding our future. It is hard to find anyone in America who still believes in the current political system. Indeed, even politicians must attack “politics as usual” in order to stand a chance of being elected. Yet here too, there is widespread cynicism that any improvement is possible. The problem seems just too big. We shrug and sigh with deepening despair, but nothing is done to change it.

Taking control of our affairs must start with doing just that. The necessary change will not come from above, however much we wish for it. The habit of taking a full part in decisions about the things that matter to us must start small, like the participatory decision-making at Zuccotti Park. At the schools our children attend, parents and teachers can form collective groups to debate the school’s business. Whatever the rules of the school, those that run it, including the local authorities, must pay heed

The same can be done at other local institutions, including hospitals or parks. Participation—and government of our own affairs—starts to become habitual and the norm. Local residents can come together to debate local concerns, from muggings to tree-planting. This is how self-government can begin.

And this is key. At no point does this book propose violent revolution, or the overthrow of the existing system, or indeed anything illegal except perhaps in resisting the most vicious repression. This is a revolution that can, and perhaps should, come about gradually, changing minds and customs day by day. It is a revolution that will come about through small actions, starting with a few, but then spreading to the many, a revolution that will come about through demonstrating the value of this new way of doing things—show, don’t tell—and neither forcing others nor lecturing them, and least of all ramming change down unyielding throats.

Gradually then, and by force of example, self-government of the many by the many can become the norm. Networks of cooperation will emerge, reinforcing positive change elsewhere. Borders need not be an obstacle. In a highly connected world, they are arguably less and less relevant. The most effective international networks of the twenty-first century have been terrorists and criminal syndicates. They have already recognized and exploited the true nature of the world today. We must replace them with better and more powerful bonds of mutual cooperation, untrammeled by archaic boundaries.

Ultimately, such bonds offer a greater stability than the fragile if logical-seeming architecture of state-based interaction, which is in fact secured upon very uncertain foundations: the false calculus of a state’s “interests.” Instead, these would be deeper and broader flows of collaboration, comprising the real and enacted interests and ideals of peoples cooperating, en masse. Indeed, the failure of the state-based system in managing our most worrying problems—economic volatility, climate change—indicates that the system itself may now be the problem, for it is more perpetuating this instability than solving it.

Again, this is not to propose the abolition of the international diplomatic system, or the demolition of the United Nations. Instead, it is about a more fundamental shift in our models—and practice—of human cooperation. But it is a shift comprising the doing of a new way, slowly replacing the old, simply by being better and rendering the earlier obsolete.

After working within government, I stopped believing that protest or campaigning can deliver real justice and enduring change, even if such methods can call attention to urgent need. The current system is far too deeply entrenched. Small but important battles for justice may be won—for instance, to legalize gay marriage, but overall the war is still being won by those who put profit before people, exploitation over the environment, and who claim states matter more than the peoples who make them. Sorry to say, but those who believe that others should be led, told or coerced, not inspired, are winning. These cynics are far fewer in number than those who want a better way. But they have the better weapons—political access and the abiding power of money over numbers. And their most powerful weapon is secret—it is our own acquiescence and belief in the immutability of the system.

In her brilliant analysis of the recent financial collapse, and how the irresponsible actions of a tiny number of bankers ruined the livelihoods of millions, the Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett offers a compelling hypothesis of how the disaster came about: “In most societies, elites try to maintain their power not simply by garnering wealth, but also by dominating the mainstream ideologies, in terms of both what is said and what is not discussed. Social ‘silences’ serve to maintain power structures, in ways that participants often barely understand themselves let alone plan.”[156]

Somehow, the neat logic of neoclassical economics and representative democracy has created a mental cage for our minds, and ambitions. In theory, such systems are ideal; but in practice, their imperfections are ever more evident. And yet the theoretical logic is so often repeated, it is as if an insurmountable wall surrounds our imagination: We can see nothing beyond, and dare not even conceive it. We have been numbed into inaction.

In the current way of things, the blatant selfishness, neglect and cruelty of the few is almost easier to stomach than the feeble apathy of those who claim that nothing better is possible, and that this is just the way things are, ordained by unarguable theory if not by some supreme power. This is exactly how the silence is perpetuated; this is exactly how the status quo is maintained.

Such numbed passivity is a denial of our very humanity—and moreover leaves the field empty for the foe. It is inhuman to tolerate the rank and visible suffering of others. To believe the patent falsehood that the few who rule know better than the many is as demeaning to the rulers as to the ruled. It is pathetic to witness the injustice of the status quo and yet do nothing, however slight, to amend it. Above all, this inaction in the face of inequity and looming crisis is to render ourselves less than we are.

There is thrill in the fight, even if there must also be fear. As Spartacus gloriously put it in the eponymous movie, “I’d rather be here, a free man among brothers, facing a long march and a hard fight, than to be the richest citizen in Rome, fat with food he didn’t work for, and surrounded by slaves.”

But this adventure will not happen of its own accord.

This book is not proposing a revolution against government, but one in our own attitudes. The individual is the most effective agent in altering their immediate circumstances. Thus, they are the most effective agent, when acting collectively, in effecting global change—in anything. Moreover, action opens a possibility that is strange and unfamiliar, a world without limits: to realize at last fully what one is, what we are as humans. This is not an immutable or logical force that we can simply observe and idly comment upon. It requires summoning up our own dark forces, our fear, our hunger, our ideals: It requires action.

The alternatives are grim to contemplate. The slow but inevitable decline in state power can be arrested, but only by governments acquiring more power, thereby constraining our own freedom and exacerbating many of the pernicious trends already here identified. The growing sense of disorder will attract those who offer to calm the stormy waters, proclaiming order and certainty in place of chaos.

Twenty-first-century fascism probably won’t look much like twentieth-century fascism. We are too inoculated—one hopes—against the crude semiotics of the swastika and black shirts and the devastating violence of the Holocaust. It will come in a different form, cleverly argued and convincingly presented. Instead of Nazis gathering in Munich beer halls, it may start on a website, for technology is indifferent to democrats or fascists. Indeed, jihadist terrorists share with twentieth-century European fascists their absolutism and willingness to sacrifice innocent life in the construction of a greater society—and they are not alone in this inhuman calculus. Meanwhile, a new breed emerges of European anti-immigration politicians and their American analogs, with smart suits and whitened teeth. As the disorder grows, so too, with inevitability, will emerge those who promise to tame it with authoritarianism and, inevitable but admitted only sotto voce, coercive force.

The choice will become clearer: to cede our voice to those louder, to watch while governments, corporations and criminal networks joust for control, or to join battle for agency over affairs that are rightfully our own.

There is no easy answer to the problems that confront humanity in the twenty-first century; it would be foolish to place our faith in one form of management—government—to solve them. Whether environmental degradation, incipient political violence, economic volatility or a host of other dangers, the evidence is stark of government’s waning powers. If others are not to exploit this instability, there is but one alternative: to step in ourselves.

The goal cannot be defined neatly, as a concrete system or a state of affairs. It is instead a method, a process, a means—which is itself an end. And by its nature, no one can define where that process may lead. Critics can paint that blank canvas with nightmares; I can suggest instead a future of cooperation, justice, mutual understanding and a deeper sense of purpose upon this crowded planet. If this path is taken, a vista of possibility may open up, beyond the dull limits of the ideas that today dominate our conception of society and ourselves. The limits are of conventional thought; the possibility is of us, ourselves: the human.

Somewhere along the way, anesthetized by vacuous but incessant politics, ubiquitous advertising and the flickering screen, we have forgotten that we are at our best in adventure, compassion for others and the aspiration for something greater. When confronted by danger and unfathomable challenge, as we surely are, only then are we truly alive. Words like “meaning,” “purpose” and “solidarity” capture a small sense of this richness, but in fact it comprises much, much more. It is nothing less than the human project, lived to the fullest. No longer a life of mere silent acceptance, but instead the imagining and construction of a true and direct democracy of the people, a vibrant but just economy and, with these prizes, a better world.

Even failure is better than acquiescence.