Radical Technology and Neighborhood Power
At Reason (“The Anarchist and the Republican,” April 13), Jesse Walker writes of a period in the 1970s when an Old Rightist speechwriter for Barry Goldwater turned New Leftist (Karl Hess), and a Nixon Republican and future Reagan speechwriter (John McClaughry), could reach unlikely consensus around values like worker self-management and ownership, and neighborhood self-governance.
Reading it makes me nostalgic for that period in the 70s where the New Deal model of capitalism had become unsustainable, and elements of both the left and right were exploring decentralist/worker-controlled and direct democratic alternatives to large-scale corporate/state capitalism.
It was a time when Community Technology (Hess), Neighborhood Power (Hess and David Morris) and the Radical Technology group in the UK — all developing technological ideas proposed by Murray Bookchin and Colin Ward — were in the Zeitgeist. The People’s Bicentennial Commission was advocating worker control of industry and local direct democracy in Common Sense II, and Harry Boyte was advocating similar ideas in The Backyard Revolution. The left wing of the Labour Party was prefiguring Corbyn’s decentralist stakeholder management agenda 40 years ahead of time. Advocacy for decentralism in every area of life was the theme of Kirkpatrick Sale’s magnum opus Human Scale. There were even strands of such thinking in Carter’s rhetoric.
Most of these currents were attempts to address the unsustainability of New Deal or Postwar Consensus capitalism, not simply by reversing or repealing it, but by moving beyond it.
The postwar model had sought to remedy chronic tendencies toward idle capacity and inadequate demand by simply boosting the purchasing power of the working class — an approach that was feasible so long as the United States and other industrial powers were engaged in rebuilding the enormous amounts of production capacity which had been destroyed by the war. But by around 1970 or so, Western Europe and the Pacific Rim had rebuilt strong industrial economies, and the problem of surplus capacity was back. Against that background, the bargaining power of unionized labor was putting unacceptable levels of pressure on profit margins.
The approach of the decentralist currents mentioned above was to transcend the crises of accumulation and realization; they aimed to do so by moving beyond the accumulation and profit imperative, to a model based instead primarily on the production of use values for the workers who kept the industry running and the communities it served. A shift to more decentralized, less capital-intensive production technologies (for example the model of networked production with small-scale, CNC machinery being pioneered in Emilia-Romagna, which was driven by the same technological trends that inspired the various alternative technology groups and the Labour left in the UK); and by a shift of income from savings to wages, would drastically reduce the problems of high overhead and idle capital that plagued capitalism in the 70s.
Unfortunately, at the same time, the leading think tanks and lobbyists of corporate capital were developing their own agenda for superseding the New Deal model with one based on offshoring and financialization, weakening popular influence on government, and breaking the power of labor.
Ultimately the latter agenda wound up being implemented, as the decentralist and genuine populist currents of the late 70s were coopted by the fake populist astroturfing of the New Right — Jarvis, Thatcher, Reagan, Falwell, and Viguerie. Coincidentally, Jesse Walker, by private email, confessed his regret for a passage he deleted from the original draft for reason of length, quoting a 1983 Human Events article by McClaughry
that celebrated that sort of decentralist populism, but also paused to warn that populism could be redirected toward a “renewed animosity directed against racial minorities and immigrants,” or a “temptation to react blindly to unfair trading practices of other nations…by erecting trade barriers of our own,” or “the ‘Man on Horseback’ syndrome — the search for the Great Leader who will make everything right.”
(Walker, incidentally, also expressed reservations concerning the “astroturf” label, since there was some genuine public support for that version of populism; but I think it’s fair to say that, at the very least, it diverted populist sentiments in a direction that would have been far less significant without corporate money behind it.)
The postwar model inevitably failed because it was unsustainable from the beginning. American New Deal capitalism could only sustain both high wages and acceptable levels of profit so long as the plant and equipment lost in WWII were in process of being rebuilt. And even then, it also relied on massive capital sinks like the military-industrial complex and automobile-based sprawl as the alternatives to even higher, politically unacceptable (to capital) wage levels. Once industrial capacity was restored to their prewar levels, those old gods of the copybook heading — overaccumulation and underconsumption — would reassert themselves.
The model of social democracy established under Atlee’s Labour government was unsustainable for the same reasons. It was also politically vulnerable because of the specific institutional model they adopted: the policy of conventional capitalist management Herbert Morrison adopted in nationalized industry, and a form of council housing in which residents were mere tenants managed by local authorities. Possession is nine-tenths not only of the law, but of power. With a model of “social democracy” in which workers were managed by the same sort of people from foreman on up as they would have been in a capitalist-owned enterprise, and in which occupants of social housing bore the same relation to their living conditions as tenants of a capitalist landlord, the power of possession was essentially nil. Once a new boss like Thatcher came along, it was a relatively simple matter to “privatize” industries and housing, and their workers and occupants had no more recourse then their counterparts in a conventional capitalist setup.
Fast forward forty-plus years, and it’s obvious the successor model is just as unsustainable as its New Deal predecessor. The cost implosion and ephemeralization of production technology has outpaced the ability of financialization and FIRE Economy bubbles to absorb surplus capital, and the drastically increased profits and levels of wealth inequality have exacerbated the problem still further. The most lucrative form of economic activity is collecting rents from ownership of intellectual property and control of finance, and actually producing things is relegated to low-wage contractors. We’ve reached a point where the deluge of rentier capital into the hands of the top 1% has not only not promoted productive investment and job creation, as per right-libertarian dogma, but has made asset-stripping and enshittification more profitable.
Once again, with the failure of financialization and corporate globalization, the American and other publics face the temptation of a false right-wing populism — the opposite of the kind McClaughry called for in his Human Events article, which would “reemphasize the importance of character, decency, honor, and generosity of spirit in public life.” Just like the New Right, the MAGA movement is a false populism that uses authoritarianism and tribalist hatred against the marginalized to distract us from solutions that offer the kind of genuine power over our lives that comes from solidarity and cooperation.
The real thing — that 70s model of industrial decentralization and relocalization, worker ownership and self-management, and neighborhood direct democracy — now seems more relevant than ever. Maybe it’s time to dust off our old copies of Radical Technology and Neighborhood Power.
