(Total Liberty,
1999-2000)
Dodgy Logic and the Olympians
by JOHN GRIFFIN
Towards an Inclusive Democracy by Takis Fotopoulos 1997.
380 pages published by Cassell, 55 hardback, 18.99 paperback
Whilst considering this book and Richard Griffin's (no
relation) article in TL4 about science and "postmodernism",
my thoughts strayed to the earliest of the ancient Greek
philosophers, those who came before Socrates. A good deal of
what they had to say really lay in the realm of science, as
we would now call it, for their purpose was to grasp what
made the world tick. As the centuries unfolded, the sciences
developed as separate branches of enquiry, and philosophy
increasingly concerned itself with how we humans fitted into
the world, that is with mind. Faced with contemporary
disasters like Marxism and nuclear bombs, one branch of
"postmodernism" has made the separation with science the
more emphatic by expressing disenchantment and even
hostility towards it.
I persist in using the inverted commas because i'm not sure
what "postmodernism" is. If it were limited to a critique of
the philosophy and science spawned by our authoritarian
cultures - the inhuman bigness, reductionism and needless
gadgetry ― i would have no quarrel with it. Richard and
others however, go further and cast doubt upon the
scientific method itself. To give creedence to a dodgy
logic, in my view tending toward Nihilism and Luddism,
Richard then turns to science (!) and enlists
Chaos/Complexity theory (CT) to support his argument. Yet CT
has none of the vacuousness of "postmodernism": we are
talking about very practical hard science. Because it
handles randomness, rejects reductionism and embraces
holism, CT is not "less certain", it is good science.
Furthermore, to me personally it is exciting, it makes me
feel that my philosophy "works" because it moves as the
world moves, thereby going some way to reconciling "mind" ―
my mind at least ― with everything else, a symbiosis between
Anarchism and cutting edge science.
With this rather heady methodology at the back of my mind, i
focused upon the economics contained in "Towards an
Inclusive Democracy," here is a set of proposals so
determinedly "modern" as to constitute a "blueprint" of a
revolutionary future. The book is well organised, accessible
(if you can afford it) and clearly written. Earlier chapters
are critiques of capitalist development, state socialism and
the ecological crisis. Assuming readers to be too familiar
with these matters, i'll pass on quickly to the positive
proposals, elaborated upon in much detail in the latter
pages.
The broad outline encompasses the familiar system of
recallable delegates applied to workplace assemblies, local
community assemblies and a confederal assembly. These are to
function together in a society which is stateless, moneyless
and in harmony with the natural world. With consumption to
be directly related to need, there is a powerful whiff of
anarchist communism here but i can’t see many communists
being enthused by the more detailed proposals - as has so
often been the case in the past things begin to unravel once
you look at the economics.
Having been told there is to be no money or market, we learn
that the factories etc are to be "owned" by the general
community, and "leased" to the "employees" for a "long-term
contract." Passing over these confusions in terminology ―
Fotopoulos is principally concerned with resolving the
problem of community control ― there is also to be a means
of exchange which is not money. Access to goods is to be
through the use of a voucher system.
The economy is to be split into a basic sector (food,
clothes etc) and a non-basic sector (lollipops, CDs etc);
basic and non-basic vouchers are to be used accordingly.
People with special needs, the disabled for instance, will
be able to have them met directly by presentation of the
appropriate vouchers. the issue of the vouchers, together
with the number of hours of work required for the production
of goods, is to be determined by the various assemblies;
supply and demand are thereby to be kept in balance. The
core idea is that Fotopoulos proposes ongoing economic
planning meetings, to replace the billions of decisions made
by individuals in the market, and instead of tax and benefit
arrangements for welfare. It is hoped that contemporary
co-ops and LETS may act as stepping stones towards these
ends.
My objections to these truly sweeping proposals are as
follows:
1) The voucher system is intentionally less flexible than a
cash economy. Heavily bureaucratic, it is burdened by
additional operating costs, and likely to collaspe under the
weight of all those meetings.
2) The vouchers will clearly regulate demand and
consumption, but one wonders how exchanges between factories
and suppliers of raw materials would be affected. What form
does capital for investment take, and how is overseas trade
to be carried out? Only the later problem is dealt with, and
dismissed in three lines, with vague talk of "bilateral or
multilateral agreements."
3) Fotopoulos rejects not only the market, tending, perhaps
deliberately to confuse it with the capitalist market, but
also the gift economy. Yet totally unregulated expressions
of mutual aid have always made a valuable contribution to
the economy and to social life generally. Why throw it all
away?
4) Having made a commitment to the ecological society, there
is no discussion of what might constitute sustainable levels
of consumption, but the voucher system could obviously be
used to ration goods.
5) The key reason for using the vouchers is to make the
hoarding of capital, and therefore a reversion to
capitalism, impossible; but psycho-social tendencies like
power seeking and greed, are surely not going to be
"engineered" out of existence by monkeying around with the
currency.
I found "Towards an Inclusive Democracy" to be strongly
reminiscent of "Workers Councils and the economics of the
Self-Managed Society" by Cornelius Castoriados, 1972, and
"Social Anarchism" by Giovanni Baldelli, 1971. What is
astouding to me, as a practical man, is that anyone can be
so reckless as to propose throwing away all the pieces of
the existing economic jigsaw, in favour of just one untried
system, yet Fotopoulos follows the above writers and does
just that. All seem blind to the fact that the market, and
the informal unregulated economy, are concrete realities
because they work, and have been working effectively for
centuries ― since the Greeks in fact. Do these people ― note
the Greek names of two of them ― sense an Olympian greatness
flowing in their veins as they take up their pens and fresn
sheets of paper? I have my tongue in cheek here, but you can
see what i mean.
Libertarian economics is desperately under theorised. The
gap will not be filled with "postmodernist" waffle, but is
surely an error to contrive narrow, reductionist models like
that of Fotopoulos, in the belief that they are
theoretically rigorous. As i've tried to make clear, modern
science, some of it at least, suggests multi-stranded,
flexible, practise based ideas, but why should some
anarchists wish to follow other paths?
Total Liberty review, vol. 2, no. 1 (1999)
Pragmatic "Anarchism" or Anarchism? ― A response to John
Griffin
By TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
John Griffin’s review of my book Towards An Inclusive
Democracy, (Cassell, 1997) ―Total Liberty (vol.
2, no. 1, summer 1999)― is so full of distortions and
misrepresentations that one wonders whether this is due to a
deliberate attack by a "pragmatic" anarchist or just to the
fact that the author never went further than reading a
couple of chapters of it (which he also manages to
misrepresent)! This is obvious from the author’s decision to
ignore the entire first part of the book, on the grounds
that ‘earlier chapters are critiques of capitalist
development, state socialism and the ecological crisis;
assuming readers to be too familiar with these matters, I'll
pass on quickly to the positive proposals, elaborated upon
in much detail in the latter pages.’ All this, when the
first part was not just a critique of capitalist development
as he (mis)represents it, but an attempt to devise an
alternative libertarian economics on the emergence of the
market economy and its development into the present
internationalised market economy—an economics which is based
on power relations rather than the usual Marxist categories.
As the same author in an earlier issue of TL (vol. 1, no. 3)
was lamenting the fact that in libertarian theory ‘there is
no thorough going economics, just smatterings from Baldelli
and Castoriadis’, it is really strange that when he came
across the first modern attempt at the development of a
libertarian economics he did not manage to perceive it as
such.
However, this fact may not be as strange as it looks
prima facie. His concluding statement below is not only
a monument of errors and distortions, but also indicative of
the sort of pragmatic "anarchism" its author suggests:
I found "Towards an Inclusive Democracy" to be strongly
reminiscent of "Workers Councils and the economics of the
Self-Managed Society" by Cornelius Castoriadis,
1972, and "Social Anarchism" by Giovanni Baldelli,
1971. What is astounding to me, as a practical man,
is that anyone can be so reckless as to propose
throwing away all the pieces of the existing economic
jigsaw, in favour of just one untried system, yet Fotopoulos
follows the above writers and does just that.
All seem blind to the fact that the market, and the informal
unregulated economy, are concrete realities because
they work, and have been working effectively for centuries -
since the Greeks in fact.
I will list the errors/distortions in this statement.
I. The economic model proposed by Castoriadis has almost
nothing in common with the Inclusive Democracy model since
the former presupposes a real market and money economy
whereas the latter, following the anarchist/libertarian
tradition is explicitly based on a moneyless, marketless and
stateless economy.
II. The model suggested by Baldelli differs significantly
from the Inclusive democracy model, as I made obvious in the
book in which I only used one idea from Baldelli (assessing
desirability for each type of work) which I expanded and
changed into a complex index of desirability.
III. An even stronger example of his reckless reading,
however, is his statement that, following Castoriadis and
Baldelli in rejecting the market (which he adopts as a
concrete reality "because it works"!), I tend ‘perhaps
deliberately to confuse it with the capitalist market’. All
this when I spent a significant part of the first chapter of
the book drawing the crucial difference between markets,
(which indeed did exist for centuries) and the system of the
market economy ―which is a broader term for capitalism― and
only has a history of two centuries!
As I make clear in the book, the reason I argue for a
moneyless, stateless, marketless economy is based on the
historical analysis offered in the first part of the book
which shows that today’s market economies have nothing to do
with the pre-‘market economies’ (i.e. pre-capitalist)
markets. Since the time of the industrial revolution, the
socially controlled markets of the past have been converted
into the systems of market economies of today for the
reasons I explain in the book. Therefore, any current talk
about going back to pre-industrial markets which would be
socially controlled etc betrays a complete lack of
understanding of the dynamic of the market economy, which
has inevitably led to the present globalised (or better
internationalised) market economy. The establishment of a
true economic democracy securing equal distribution of
economic power among all citizens is incompatible with
markets, money and states. It seems however that Griffin’s
‘pragmatic’ anarchism (and unfortunately this characterises
several people in the British anarchist movement) can live
with a market economy based on money – a stand which is not
that different from the one supported by the demoralised
Left today!
No wonder that Griffin supports the need for a money
economy on the grounds that ‘psycho-social tendencies like
power seeking and greed, are surely not going to be
"engineered" out of existence by monkeying around with the
currency’ (point 5 of his specific comments). It seems that
for ‘pragmatic’ anarchists people are born greedy and are
not made greedy by the money/market economy, as libertarians
used to believe before the discovery of pragmatic
"anarchism". If this is anarchism, one wonders, why bother
with it and not join, instead, the left wing of the Labour
party. This way we would be even more ‘effective’, and
effectiveness seems to be the litmus test for any theory of
action, as far as this sort of pragmatic ‘anarchism’ is
concerned.
To return to the book, the first part, which was ignored by
my reviewer, is critical in understanding the second part.
This is because the proposal for an inclusive democracy is
not just another utopian libertarian proposal. It is seen as
perhaps the only way out of the present crisis which, as
this part of the book shows, is due to the concentration of
power at all levels to which the present system based on the
market economy and the nation-state has led us.
In the rest of this response, being conscious of the space
constraints, I will try to deal briefly with some of the
specific points of ‘criticism’ raised by John Griffin.
1. It is an absolute distortion that the core idea of the
libertarian model of the economy proposed by the book is
‘ongoing economic planning meetings, to replace the billions
of decisions made by individuals in the market’, and that
the voucher system, which is characterised as ‘heavily
bureaucratic’, is burdened by additional operating costs,
and "likely to collapse under the weight of all those
meetings." In fact, the opposite is the case! The voucher
system has been proposed as an effective way of replacing
the real market ―which is singularly unable to meet the
needs of all citizens (in fact, the majority of world
citizens)― with an artificial market. A way which avoids the
bureaucracy of the planning mechanism and at the same time
secures freedom of choice and the meeting of the needs of
all citizens. The billions of decisions Griffin refers to
will still be made by individuals, through vouchers, and
only the overall allocation of resources will be decided by
the assemblies. It seems, however, that the pragmatic
‘anarchism’ of John Griffin cannot do without money and
markets, despite the fact that most important anarchist
writers, from Bakunin and the other classical anarchists in
the past, to Bookchin today, have always talked about a
moneyless and marketless economy!
2. As regards the question of how the exchanges between
factories on raw materials etc would be effected and what
form investment would take, I have described in the book (p
267) the general principles behind the way in which the
production of such ‘intermediate goods’ and technology would
be determined.
3. I never "rejected" the gift economy, as my critic
asserts. People can use the goods they obtain by means of
non-basic vouchers for whatever purpose they like,
including, of course, the expression of mutual aid. What I
ruled out was a "moral" economy which does not provide for
any mechanism of allocation of scarce resources because I
think that such an economy belongs to the communist fiction
of a post-scarcity society.
4. The reason why "there is no discussion of what might
constitute sustainable levels of consumption" is that this
cannot be determined in advance, without knowledge of the
specific circumstances and the time/place constraints. This
is a decision to be taken democratically by citizens’
assemblies and I have explained in the book why the
institutional framework of an inclusive democracy is highly
likely to raise the level of ecological consciousness. This
is so because, in contrast to today’s’ market/money
institutional framework (which pragmatic ‘anarchists’ do not
reject), in an inclusive democracy there will be no
institutional pressures for the production/reproduction of a
growth economy.
In conclusion, I would like to stress that, to my mind, it
is not accidental that British anarchists have for the most
part either ignored or attacked the inclusive democracy
project, as has been expressed in the book Towards An
Inclusive Democracy (which has already been published in
Italian and Greek and is being translated into Spanish) as
well as in Democracy & Nature, The Journal of Inclusive
Democracy, of which five volumes have been published (15
issues of about 220 pages each). The reason is that British
anarchism is unfortunately dominated by ‘pragmatist’ or
irrationalist tendencies, which are inimical to any idea of
a radical remaking of society on the basis of a genuine
democracy. But it is at least ironic that the same people
who lament the desperate ‘under theorisation’ of libertarian
economics should dismiss and attack an attempt (as far as I
know the only attempt at the moment) to remedy this, not by
engaging in a rational debate about it but by simply
distorting and misrepresenting it!
Takis Fotopoulos
Editor, Democracy & Nature ― The Journal of
Inclusive Democracy
Total Liberty, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 2000)
Dear Editor
Takis Fotopoulos feels that I have misrepresented his book,
"Towards an Inclusive Democracy", when I reviewed it in the
Summer '99 issue. However, T.F. has not properly answered my
criticisms and I stand by them, excepting only the comments
on the gift economy. I welcome T.F.'s confirmation of its
usefulness, and apologise for my misreading of page 270. We
are also united in rejecting Bookchin's post-scarcity
economics.
It is good to see more contributions to the economics
debate, but I do not have to agree with them, especially
when the proposals are as far removed from established
practice as are those of T.F. The scope and complexity of
his book makes it difficult to review comprehensively, and I
did make it clear that I had concentrated on his alternative
economics. I thought that T.F.'s reply only confirmed his
muddled thinking concerning the nature of the market and
social/psychological structures.
T.F. must be confusing "Workers Councils" by Castoriadis
with some other, maybe later work; based on Marx's Labour
theory of Value, it hardly depicts what T.F! calls a "real
market". Castoriadis wants to use "tokens", T.F. wants
"vouchers" and Baldelli wants "credits". All three use
economic planning via various assemblies, none use cash or
market mechanisms. Such a viewpoint cuts across communist,
collectivist and individualist positions, so the
unpopularity of T.F.'s book is hardly surprising. That said,
it and the others referred to are unique and should be read.
What is surprising is T.F.'s suspicion of my part in some
conspiracy against his work. I resent this, as well as his
grotesque portrayal of my views as being comparable with
those of the Labour Left. What rubbish! The Spring 2000
issue of Total Liberty, which carries T.F.'s reply also has
an article of mine which links anarchist shortcomings in
economics with sectarianism….depressing.
Yours
John Griffin
Total Liberty, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn 2000)
Dear Editor,
It is depressing indeed to see self-declared anarchists like
John Griffin (TL, Autumn 2000) not only misrepresenting my
attempt in Towards An Inclusive Democracy to renew
libertarian thought on economics and to revive the
discussion of a liberatory project but, even when caught
doing so, coming back and asserting --without a shred of
evidence-- that I have not properly answered his criticisms
and that he stands by them. This fact alone would leave no
doubt that his misrepresentation of the book, far from being
accidental or due to a mistaken reading, was in fact a
deliberate distortion of it by a ‘pragmatic’ anarchist
(readers can decide for themselves by reading the exchange
in its entirety rather than in instalments if they visit the
Democracy & Nature’ website <www.geocities.com/democracy_nature>
in which the complete exchange is hosted). This of
course does not mean that I think there exists
“some conspiracy against my work” as JG would want
the readers of Total Liberty to believe. The
misrepresantation of ideas doesn’t have to be part
of some “dark” conspiracy: the mere will to silence
any serious liberatory project, that doesn’t add up
to pragmatic “anarchism”, is enough.
But what is entertaining is that whereas JG admits that he
rejects my proposals because they are ‘far removed from
established practice’, at the same time he protests about my
‘grotesque portrayal of (his) views as being comparable with
those of the Labour Left’. However, my comparison of his
pragmatic ‘anarchism’ to the Labour Left (as it used to be)
is not related to the issue of a transitional strategy,
which obviously has to take the existing system for
granted—on this we agree. My comparison is based on the fact
that JG also rejects my proposal (based on the dominant
tradition in the anarchist movement since the time of
Bakunin) for a future society founded on a stateless,
marketless, moneyless economy, on the grounds that, as he
puts it, ‘psycho-social tendencies like power seeking and
greed, are surely not going to be "engineered" out of
existence by monkeying around with the currency.’ I assume
that anarchist readers would find it very hard indeed to see
what the difference is between a ‘pragmatic’ anarchism which
takes the system of the market and money economy for granted
and, for instance, what Tony Benn has always preached!
As for my supposed ‘muddled thinking concerning the nature
of the market’ it is obvious that JG is unable to understand
that today’s market economy is in fact the inevitable
outcome of the evolution of a system that was established
two hundred years ago, and that markets and money are
inseparable characteristics of this system (the
pre-capitalist markets existing before the emergence of this
system have nothing to do with the present market economy
―see for instance Polanyi) and not options that we may adopt
in a libertarian society. Furthermore, unable to see that
the book offers a new method of economic regulation (for a
sophisticated contemporary economy) based on economic
democracy, he proposes to keep the markets and money,
ignoring their dynamic towards the concentration of economic
power. The reason for this is, as he puts it, that ‘they
have been working effectively for centuries’ ―minus (one may
add) the starvation of almost half the Earth’s population
and the present ecological destruction!.
Finally, as regards my "confusion" of Castoriadis’ Workers’
Councils with his adoption of a real market, Castoriadis
implicitly assumed a real market in this work (see my
exchange with David Ames Curtis (D&N, vol. 5 no. 1, March
1999) and he explicitly made this clear in a later work
(Radical Philosophy, vol. 56 Autumn 1990). As far as JG’s
attempt to degrade my book by talking about its
‘unpopularity’, I wonder where he got his information
because, according to my information, the book was not only
successful in the Anglo-Saxon world and has also been
published in Italian and Greek and translated into Spanish
(as I mentioned in my previous reply to him), but it is
currently being translated into German, while a French
version of it is due to be published by Seuil of Paris ―all
of them during 2001 (I hope that my defence against JG’s
unsubstantiated claims will not give him the idea to come
back blaming me for "advertising" my book!)
Yours
Takis Fotopoulos
Total Liberty, Vol. 3, No. 1 (autumn 2001)