An Essay called "What is the best possible society for our wretched species?"

What is the best possible society for our wretched species?

An Attempt to Define the Precise Parameters of Utopianism and the Optimal Economic Organisation of Society for Maximum Justice and Liberty

Over the past year and a half, I have slowly come to view Noam Chomsky’s ideal society – a properly democratic, fully technologically advanced anarcho-syndicalist society where everyone has meaningful work – as the least ridiculous utopia us humans have yet thought of. Imagine a world where all illegitimate authority was dismantled as soon as it arose and real democracy – literal rule by the people – was the system of governance. Terrific. And I say it’s “the least ridiculous utopia” because the story of how we get there is not totally ridiculous, even in the case of America. In fact, I can outline a (very vague) plan. First, people elect Bernie Sanders, then they get a series of New Deal policies again,[1] then he lights the spark for a massive resurgence of the trade unions, then there is a massive resurgence in proletarian solidarity and strength, then a massive campaign of  consciousness-raising occurs (corporate propaganda from the mainstream media is totally overcome), then the workers of America (in their gigantic unions) begin a wave of huge strikes and protests to demand greater control over their workplaces, then this pressure causes wage equalisation so that eventually CEO salaries are only a little higher than those of average workers, then lots of Mondragons[2] begin to arise, then the economic system gradually evolves into a less capitalistic form as entire towns and regions begin to become anarchistic in administrative structure, then slowly the political, economic and social institutions are reformed, and we finally arrive at “a federated, decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions […] the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine […] a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that [is] intrinsic to human nature will in fact be able to realize itself in whatever way it will.”

Excellent.

Is this actually plausible though? For one thing, this process would take more than one hundred years, and there would be millions of junctures along the line where the whole enterprise could just collapse completely. Indeed, such pitfalls would surely be present from the very beginning. I mean, it’s not too hard to imagine Bernie Sanders getting elected and despite what I said in footnote 1, it’s not impossible that Bernie could re-Keynesianise/re-Rooseveltise America without a disaster. But it’s very hard to imagine him being able to successfully light the spark for a massive resurgence of the trade unions in 21^st Century America, given that the working person has been so thoroughly beaten into submission since the 1980s and the very idea of unionism has been so thoroughly obliterated. Ever since globalisation took manufacturing offshore, we have also lost the beating heart of trade unions – big factories full of workers. In today’s world, it’s hard to even know what it is to be a “proletariat” or a “common man (/person)”. Are Mcdonald’s workers, receptionists, plumbers, cleaners, public school teachers and lowly businesspeople all part of the proletariat? Who knows?

Unfortunately, this greater ambiguity of class relations makes it much harder to imagine a united proletariat standing up to the “managerial class” (the word “bourgeoisie” seems totally inappropriate) and eventually overthrowing them, even if that overthrowing was nothing more than a gradual, incremental process of popular pressure leading to the co-operatisation of corporations and communisation of communities on an ever-increasing scale. In general, our 21^st Century corporate society throws up all kinds of dilemmas for any kind of thinking that could be vaguely construed as ‘Marxist’. Is a manager at McDonalds part of the managerial class? Is the owner of the small business you work for part of the managerial class? Are tenured academics at university part of the managerial class? The only solution seems to be to think about class in terms of the Occupy Wall Street doctrine: there are now two classes, Us and Them – We are the 99%, They are the 1%. This is an excellent slogan to use if you seek to make America less plutocratic, and re-impose corporate regulations and strong social security etc (as Bernie does want to do), but one issue is that 99% is probably too big a figure. Anarcho-syndicalists definitely have more class enemies than just the people who fit in the top 1% bracket for wealth. Are 99% of citizens willing to join trade unions and fight on behalf of all working people? In order for that to happen, there really would have to be a radical change in Western culture.

Of course, if anarcho-syndicalists did somehow get millions of workers to strike simultaneously, it’s not too hard to imagine that they could force corporations to radically restructure themselves into co-operative-style corporations like Mondragon (and thence to full-on co-operatives and thence – gradually – to a new, non-capitalist economic system). But how do you get millions of workers to strike simultaneously, or even thousands of workers to strike simultaneously? The consciousness-raising and union-restrengthening would have to be immense. Can you imagine Americans suddenly all becoming radical leftists within the next one hundred years? I, for one, cannot.

 Since I am extremely misanthropic, I also suspect we’d fuck it up majorly along the way, even if most of the underlying conditions were in place. I think I more or less subscribe to Karl Popper’s deeply pessimistic view of politics, expounded in his great political work The Open Society and its Enemies. Before I actually explain what this view is, I’ll quickly go through his biographical background, as it is highly relevant to his political conceptions.

Popper was born in Vienna in 1902, a Jew by birth. As all non-ignoramuses would know, early 20^th Century Austria was a place of tremendous political and economic turmoil, and his youth would have been passed in an extremely unstable and politically charged world.  Vienna at that time was the sort of place where demagogues lurked around every street corner, each preaching their own remedy for society’s ills. As a teenager, Popper rode the zeitgeist somewhat, joining the Association of Socialist School Students and later the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, which at that time was a fully-fledged Marxian organisation. However, after a street battle in the Horglasse on 15 June 1919, when the police shot eight of his unarmed comrades from the party, he began to question his trust in Marxist doctrine. Soon after, he completely abandoned Marx’s “pseudoscientific” historical materialism. In 1928, he earned a doctorate of psychology. After that, he became a secondary school teacher in maths and physics. In his early 30s, while still working as a teacher, a new worry entered Popper’s life: the rise of Hitler and the threat of Anschluss. Popper was so worried by Hitler it motivated him to begin writing his first book, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, recognising that a published book would give him a chance of getting an academic position in a country where Jews could live safely. In 1935, he took unpaid leave for a study visit to the United Kingdom, and in 1937 he secured a post as a philosophy lecturer in a total backwater, far away from Europe and Fascism: the University of New Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote Open Society and its Enemies.

It’s no surprise that all of this turmoil in his formative years left a lasting impression on poor old Popper. More than anything else, it left him with a deep suspicion of political idealism in all its forms. His personal development in this direction is strongly reflected in the book. In chapter 7 of the work, “Principle of Leadership”, he famously writes:

“It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ or ‘Whose will should be supreme?’, etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy. […] It is clear that once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is asked, it is hard to avoid some such reply as ‘the best’ or ‘the wisest’ or ‘the born ruler’ or ‘he who masters the art of ruling’ (or, perhaps, ‘The General Will’ or ‘The Master Race’ or ‘The Industrial Workers’ or ‘The People’). But such a reply, convincing as it may sound—for who would advocate the rule of ‘the worst’ or ‘the greatest fool’ or ‘the born slave’?—is, as I shall try to show, quite useless. First of all, such a reply is liable to persuade us that some fundamental problem of political theory has been solved. But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”

As this passage shows, Popper believes, like I believe, “that we are all frail”: that there are no really “great men” (or even great women, though of course nobody ever talks about them), and that those most attracted to power will most likely be ruthless, callous, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, zealous, unphilosophical, glib, mendacious, greedy and venal. It is on this basis that he supports democracy – not because it has any intrinsic value, but simply because it provides a nonviolent, institutionalised and regular way to get rid of bad rulers. In this way, democracy mirrors the trial-and-error process that he held up as the scientific ideal in all his books and even turned into a kind of epistemological theory, Falsificationism. More specifically, the democracy that he supports is orthodox Western capitalist ‘liberal’ ‘democracy’. The reasoning is that democracies like England (at least as they were in the 40s) are “the best of all political worlds of whose existence we have any historical knowledge”. Another major justification he has for being quite conservative in this sense is his belief that we should only ever seek change through “piecemeal engineering” of concrete social problems (for example, poverty, violence, unemployment, environmental degradation, income inequality). He regards piecemeal engineering as a far more ‘scientific’, rational and safe process than lofty utopian engineering according to abstract ideals, because of the way it also leaves room for experimentation and uncertainty. He writes, “This—and no Utopian planning or historical prophecy—would mean the introduction of scientific method into politics, since the whole secret of scientific method is a readiness to learn from mistakes”. Finally, the basis on which piecemeal social engineers should assess the urgency of problems is something Popper called “negative utilitarianism”, meaning a utilitarianism where the concern is not maximising happiness but minimising suffering. He defends this both on the ground that it offers clearer policy objectives and because this kind of negative telos is a corrective to the slide into the overweening ambition of utopianism or romanticism. 

Although I introduced Popper as a kind of antagonist to Chomsky and anarcho-syndicalism, it is worth observing that this pessimism about rulers, this attachment to piecemeal engineering and this belief in negative utilitarianism, though they work very well against most forms of political idealism, seemingly don’t hurt anarcho-syndicalism. The great virtue of anarcho-syndicalism is that – in theory at least – it circumvents such problems.

First of all, the “bad-ruler” objection to political idealism is obviously defeated by anarchism, and for one simple reason: anarchists don’t have any rulers! Some administrators and officials are, of course, still necessary in an anarcho-syndicalist society, but they are kept in check by exactly the mechanism Popper endorses to keep rulers in check in his theory: democracy.  In fact, an anarcho-syndicalist society would be far better at preventing rulers from “doing too much damage” than a conventional capitalist ‘liberal’ ‘democracy’, because unlike a capitalist society, where true democracy is impossible due to concentration of capital and power,[3] an anarcho-syndicalist society permits a highly rigorous democracy, with votes by the people operating at all strata of society, right down to the bottom. This ultimately ensures that no illegitimate authority is left intact. What’s more, it doesn’t even come at the expense of our technologically advanced way of life! (in theory).

Secondly, as I’ve briefly discussed, the way we get to anarcho-syndicalism is not through any grand “revolution” or one class rising up against another in a violent struggle or revolt. Instead, it would be through a gradual process of relatively piecemeal change from within a country. It would be through the slow strengthening of internal institutions and the building up of support, leading eventually to major strikes – but no attempts to suddenly overthrow the state. Although he might have been accused of it by some, Chomsky is nothing like a Marxist in this way, and has even said, “Abolishing the state is not a strategy”.  

Lastly, the anarchist aim would not be happiness for all, but something quite similar to the “negative utilitarianism” Popper espouses, since the one polestar that would guide anarcho-syndicalist activity is a negative goal: dismantling all illegitimate authority. Anarchists do not aim to make everyone happy or create a heaven-on-earth, just to make our world as free and just as it can reasonably be. It is true that Popper generally disapproved of following ideals and reviled lofty goals, but he himself made some kind of exception for freedom. In a book called Unended Quest, he even claimed that “Freedom is more important than equality”.

All this means that anarcho-syndicalism is probably the one strain of utopianism (which I am basically using to mean “proposal for non-capitalist society”) that evades most of Popper’s criticisms of utopias. In addition, one fact that would count against lumping Chomsky along with all the other “theorists of universal humaneness”[4] is that – though it may seem surprising – he actually shares many of Popper’s epistemological views: about the superiority of the natural sciences in their methodology and results, and the absolute importance of meticulous empiricism and vigorous debate. Another parallel with Popper is that Chomsky speaks often about human cognitive limits and the need for humility about our progress (“Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries”). Like Popper, he is also critical of Marx and reviles all forms of idolatry and great-man-worship. And just as Popper derides bad social science theorising in his critique of “historicism”, Chomsky is known for his searing criticism of postmodernism and the “corrupt French intellectual culture”. Essentially, it’s fair to say that they both take a Humean view of epistemology:

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

We can still rest assured, of course, that Popper would not approve of Chomsky’s politics – not fully anyway. As I said before, Popper was suspicious of all attempts to move away from modern Western liberal democracies because of their openness and the almost scientific process of experimentation that the two-party democratic system enables. In the preface to the second edition of the work in discussion, he writes something very antithetical to Chomsky’s view of politics and activism: “I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.” More importantly, in chapter 9 – the chapter in which Popper contrasts the safe, scientific scepticism of piecemeal social engineering with the emotional, reckless romanticism of utopian social engineering – some of Popper’s best objections do indeed apply to anarcho-syndicalism. Anarcho-syndicalists may have the case study of Revolutionary Catalonia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia) and the example of Mondragon as evidence for the possibility of working people taking control in peaceful unity and for the essential plausibility and productivity of anarchistic social relations. However, there still remains a problem of knowledge. No-one on earth can really imagine a well-functioning non-capitalist society, even if they could imagine a well-functioning non-capitalist single co-operative or a limited anarcho-syndicalism. And how can anyone really know how an anarcho-syndicalist society would work out, or if it would even turn out for the best? This problem of insufficient knowledge is one of the biggest qualms Popper has with utopian thinking. As he writes, “Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale; whether it be practicable; whether it would result in a real improvement; what kind of suffering it may involve; and what may be the means for its realization.” The decades or centuries it would take for anarcho-syndicalism to become a major force is also something that Popper would regard as a major flaw:

“The very sweep of such a Utopian undertaking makes it improbable that it will realize its ends during the lifetime of one social engineer, or group of engineers. And if the successors do not pursue the same ideal, then all the sufferings of the people for the sake of the ideal may have been in vain. A generalization of this argument leads to a further criticism of the Utopian approach. This approach, it is clear, can be of practical value only if we assume that the original blueprint, perhaps with certain adjustments, remains the basis of the work until it is completed. But that will take some time. It will be a time of revolutions, both political and spiritual, and of new experiments and experience in the political field. It is therefore to be expected that ideas and ideals will change. What had appeared the ideal state to the people who made the original blueprint, may not appear so to their successors. If that is granted, then the whole approach breaks down. The method of first establishing an ultimate political aim and then beginning to move towards it is futile if we admit that the aim may be considerably changed during the process of its realization. It may at any moment turn out that the steps so far taken actually lead away from the realization of the new aim. And if we change our direction according to the new aim, then we expose ourselves to the same risk again. In spite of all the sacrifices made, we may never get anywhere at all.”

There is also the problem – hinted at here – that even if a trade-union uprising started out as anarcho-syndicalist, someone in the movement might decide that freedom isn’t that important (after all, it’s not an objective truth, it’s just a value) and then rapidly amass a following of like-minded people. The reason this could be so disastrous is that “Since there is no rational method for determining the ultimate aim […] any difference of opinion between Utopian engineers must therefore lead, in the absence of rational methods, to the use of power instead of reason, i.e. to violence.” The evidence does largely bear Popper out on this inference: this partly happened in Spain (there were rifts between anarchists and non-anarchist communists etc) and it definitely happened in Russia (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin and Trotsky etc). Along a similar vein, Popper claims that “the Utopian method must lead to a dangerous dogmatic attachment to a blueprint for which countless sacrifices have been made. Powerful interests must become linked up with the success of the experiment. All this does not contribute to the rationality, or to the scientific value, of the experiment.”

Finally, Popper brings out the classic charge levelled against socialists, anarchists and their ilk: that they are letting their emotions get the better of the truth and are driven more by what Popper calls “aestheticism” than a sober, clear-eyed look at the world:

“This sweep, this extreme radicalism of the Platonic approach (and of the Marxian as well) is, I believe, connected with its aestheticism, i.e. with the desire to build a world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which is free from all its ugliness: not a crazy quilt, an old garment badly patched, but an entirely new gown, a really beautiful new world. This aestheticism is a very understandable attitude; in fact, I believe most of us suffer a little from such dreams of perfection. (Some reasons why we do so will, I hope, emerge from the next chapter.) But this aesthetic enthusiasm becomes valuable only if it is bridled by reason, by a feeling of responsibility, and by a humanitarian urge to help. Otherwise it is a dangerous enthusiasm, liable to develop into a form of neurosis or hysteria.”

Although this passage seems to exculpate those who are “bridled by reason” (like Chomsky, or the logic-God and socialist Bertrand Russell), Popper gives the impression a few paragraphs later that all “aesthetic enthusiasm” is unreasonable and ultimately dangerous:

“Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from an intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell—that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.”

Again, in using these arguments to criticise anarcho-syndicalism, we must bear in mind that in many ways it is a political theory unlike Marxism or Fascism: it does not involve any kind of revolution, it seems to gain an intrinsic incorruptibility by abjuring autocracy, and it does not strive to achieve a perfect world, just one without illegitimate authority. On the other hand, we must also bear in mind that it probably does have a romantic element to it. And in fact, I personally think Chomsky is at his least logical when talking about human nature in a political framework. While Chomsky denies any deductive link between his linguistics work and his political views, it seems to me that Steven Pinker is probably right to claim that Chomsky uses the central, remarkable fact he highlighted about language – that it is a finite, combinatorial system that allows one to generate an infinity of expressions – in order to make a more poetic generalisation about the essential “creativity” of human beings (as well as our urge to co-operate). Now, to be fair, I certainly understand Chomsky’s scepticism about language’s evolution and his opposition to Steven Pinker on evo psych in general,[5] but I also suspect Pinker isn’t entirely wrong when he claims that you do have to be some kind of romantic to accept anarcho-syndicalism. In order for anarcho-syndicalism to work, people have to be willing to work of their own accord – to experience the joy of creative labour and production, and the thrill of self-expression – and they have to be more or less nonviolent and more or less co-operative, once put in an environment which fosters peace and harmony. One could argue that, once you get to the co-operative stage – once you’re in an anarcho-syndicalist community – the environment would be one in which altruism was fostered constantly, from the very beginning of your life, and the ethical norms would undoubtedly be more egalitarian and magnanimous than those that obtain in our own, highly competitive, rather vicious capitalist society. As Chomsky has said in a recent interview, “The task for social policy is to design the ways we live and the institutional and cultural structure of our lives so as to favour the benign and to suppress the harsh and destructive aspects of our fundamental nature”. Since the community would be highly cohesive and highly equal and everyone would be educated, there wouldn’t be any ghettos – which are obviously great sites of violence today – and you might instead find crime rates characteristic of affluent people in Scandinavian countries today i.e. negligible to non-existent. With an extremely robust democratic architecture – every level of organisation having a strong voting process with administrators and officials constantly under scrutiny – you might also expect that it would be very hard to corrupt the system. With strong democracy inevitably comes transparency, accountability and responsibility. Greedy renegades seeking to hijack the system would simply be howled out of town; they would have no power.

But this is all assuming a set of improbable conditions. It is assuming that everything is working perfectly, that the infrastructure is all in place, that there are no resource shortages, that everyone is happy to work for the sake of it etc. Most importantly, it is assuming that there are no problems of production or resource-shortages. But there could easily be anarcho-syndicalist communities where the whole thing goes belly up. One of the problems is that, in order to make complex machinery and transport and so on, you still need factories and people doing unpleasant manual labour (unless the production line becomes fully automated). You still need some people doing cleaning and plumbing and working in sewerage treatment facilities. How would that work? Maybe we get to assume automation for those really unpleasant jobs – but you can’t just assume everything away. And this is just one example of millions. How would a society where everyone has to choose where to work based on preference (because wage differences would, in theory, be small[6]) actually get people to work in objectively unpleasant jobs? I can’t see it.   

And what if you don’t even get to that final stage of anarcho-syndicalist organisation, where everything is democratic and wonderful? The problems of transition are big enough. It was easy enough to lay out a set of plausible-sounding stages in my vague plan for the transition, but it’s really impossible to know if they could work. Would the unions become divided? Would there be sectarian or internecine conflicts? Would mass strikes break out into violence and looting? Would the political class resort to violent repressions as workers started trying to assert their power? Would there be millions of middle-class or upper-middle class people siding with the establishment? Would a more co-operatised economy falter for some reason? Would there be a problem with drug addiction in a society with less order, regimentation and control? Might a self-proclaimed anarcho-syndicalist come along who actually had autocratic ambitions (a kind of Lenin figure) and then destroy the anarcho-syndicalist movement? Would the movement have to be a global movement to be effective? If one country became fully anarcho-syndicalist, would it be at risk of foreign conquest or intervention by non-anarcho-syndicalist countries? Would anything work at all?  

It seems astronomically unlikely that everything would turn out rosy, that’s for sure.

The example of Catalonia can give us some guidance, of course. The Catalonian anarcho-syndicalists, represented by the CNT (the National Confederation of Workers) had the huge advantage that production was localised: once the farms were collectivised, all the necessities for people to live were produced in the area. This means that the communes became fully self-sufficient. And in the short-term, this led to what is best characterised as an extraordinary success. As we discover from Wikipedia, a pro-anarchist bloke called Eddie Conlon wrote the following about what began to happen in 1936:

“If you didn't want to join the collective you were given some land but only as much as you could work yourself. You were not allowed to employ workers. Not only production was affected, distribution was on the basis of what people needed. In many areas money was abolished.[7] People come to the collective store (often churches which had been turned into warehouses) and got what was available. If there were shortages rationing would be introduced to ensure that everyone got their fair share. But it was usually the case that increased production under the new system eliminated shortages.

In agricultural terms the revolution occurred at a good time. Harvests that were gathered in and being sold off to make big profits for a few landowners were instead distributed to those in need. Doctors, bakers, barbers, etc. were given what they needed in return for their services. Where money was not abolished a 'family wage' was introduced so that payment was on the basis of need and not the number of hours worked.

Production greatly increased. Technicians and agronomists helped the peasants to make better use of the land. Modern scientific methods were introduced and in some areas yields increased by as much as 50%. There was enough to feed the collectivists and the militias in their areas. Often there was enough for exchange with other collectives in the cities for machinery. In addition food was handed over to the supply committees who looked after distribution in the urban areas.”

  However, as Wikipedia also informs us, this massive economic luxury was not enough to make the anarchist gospel popular among the non-working class. The CNT tried to persuade members of the middle class and bourgeoisie to join the revolution, and discovered that the well-off were generally not keen on a revolution that involved the expropriation of their businesses under force or threat of force and a worker's wage. What a terrific surprise!

Of course, there is no real horror story to tell about anarcho-syndicalism in Revolutionary Catalonia, but that definitely doesn’t mean that the events there prove Popper wrong about idealism. Not by any stretch of the imagination. After all, the whole experiment was over after only a few years: both the anarchists and the communists (who were at loggerheads) ended up having to wage a mighty civil war against the fascists. Ultimately, their revolution was crushed.  

On the other hand, one could argue that all of these objections to an anarcho-syndicalist transition are missing the point. There is a reason that Chomsky himself has never elaborated a theory of transition from our current advanced, industrial, highly technological, financialised, Wall-St-dominated, McdonaldsWalmartNike capitalist society to an anarcho-syndicalist society where all the big ‘corporations’ that exist are not really corporations as we know them (because everyone’s paid about the same and they are democratically structured) and everyone’s fully engaged in a highly democratic governmental structure, with lots of democratic unions (or syndicates), and a political structure that involves a local democratic parliament of some kind, then a regional democratic parliament of some kind, then a bigger-regional democratic parliament of some kind, all of which are accountable to a fully educated, fully engaged populace. The reason why he doesn’t elaborate such a theory is that, like me, he doesn’t know how the transition would work, and he doesn’t know what the final society would look like above these broad brushstrokes. Conversely, he does know that any attempt to engineer a sudden, violent revolution is necessarily going to end in disaster and therefore that all plans ever made by the more radical anarchists, Marxists, socialists (or whatever) are terrible and stupid and should be destroyed forthwith. I strongly believe that no-one should ever actually aim to ‘overthrow the state’ or ‘give power to the people’. They should just be focussed on short-term aims, like spreading the word about the injustices of our present society and encouraging people to join organisations.

So, really, the way I conceive of anarcho-syndicalism – and I think the way Chomsky conceives of it – is just as a telos for all social-justice movements to aim for. It is only specific inasmuch as it proposes a vision of a society with a logically possible and practically unabsurd system of economic and political organisation that would nevertheless result in a far greater equality, democracy and freedom than our own society. But it is mostly unspecific: it fails to say any more than that an anarcho-syndicalist society will be an advanced, industrial, technological society where people are very close to equal in terms of income, where there are strong democratic structures from the local to the global level, where corporations are internally democratic, where there are no such things as capitalists or speculators, where education and healthcare are free, and where the police force is minimal (to the point of non-existence). It fails to tell us when, or if, we should expect such a society to evolve. It fails to even tell us that we should try to make it come sooner than is its ‘right time’. In fact, it should strongly warn against the seduction of revolution and violent revolt. Instead, it should tell us that short-term goals are more sensible – that we should aim only to carry out consciousness-raising, to spread the word, to set up our own organisations, to support the unions that exist already, and to support the left-wing politicians that exist already, despite the fact that such politicians will be working for a state we ideally would like to see abolished.

I believe the only long-term goal for at least another generation or two should be to create more societies like Norway: strong, Keynesian welfare states where education and healthcare are free, and almost everyone has a job. The telos that is anarcho-syndicalism will tell us that we should eventually seek to do even better than that – replacing the state altogether. But we should not be impatient. Fortunately, once you do get to a Norway-like state, public norms and mores are altered by the process of the society becoming more socialistic and just, and it should therefore become easier to head in the direction of an even more just, egalitarian and liberated society.

Of course, I am not myself sure that a state-capitalist-‘socialist’ society like Norway shouldn’t itself be the telos. If every country in the world was like Norway, then you’d have to think that would drastically reduce suffering and almost certainly eliminate war. Should we hope for more than that? Should we really hope to erode the state and replace capitalism as well?  

Even if we do want to go further than Norway, it might be best to do this by expanding the state, and creating a serious state-socialist society (i.e. one that has eliminated capitalism). In other words, perhaps we should seek to abolish capitalism, but do it by placing all industries in the hands of the state (eschewing the libertarian socialism of anarcho-syndicalism, but still seeking state socialism). We can certainly appeal to authority for this position: Bertrand Russell held this view, and he even offers us a fairly cogent argument for it. Russell’s vision of socialism (sometimes called “Fabian socialism”), involved state control of just about everything, but with a robust democratic architecture in place to prevent tyranny and exploitation. Russell would have seen Norway as still a little too capitalist – still tyrannised by the “profit motive” of private enterprises.

In “The Case for Socialism”, a chapter in his 1935 essay collection, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, Russell defines “the economic part” of socialism as “State ownership of ultimate economic power, which involves, as a minimum, land and minerals, capital, banking, credit and foreign trade”, and “the political part” as democratic control. This, he argues, would – if everything went to plan – destroy the profit motive, increase leisure, reduce economic insecurity, eliminate the idle rich, enable education for all, emancipate women, guarantee welfare for children, improve the quality of art, give people access to many public services, and end war.

However good it may sound on paper, Russell himself was well aware that state socialism would not be a perfect system. Indeed, Russell’s emphasis on the importance of democracy for such a society betrays the system’s main flaw: the immense power of the state and the attendant possibility for overreach and exploitation. The democratic structure would have to be extremely robust to continuously push back against the attempts of the powerful to take more power and to use their influence for censorship, thought control and so on. It is no doubt possible for this to work, but the tug-of-war would also never cease.

In Russell’s favour, there would be two factors assisting the people in defending their rights: the universal education and the strong medical system. These would probably militate against the growth of tyranny, because the polity would be fully engaged, unimpaired, and know its interests and how to seek them.

Yet even if you regard these factors as a kind of solution, one must bear in mind that the power of the state is not the only weakness with a state-socialist system. Another potential flaw of such a socialist society would be the tendency towards economic stagnation and stasis. If post-Stalinist Russia is anything to go by, societies where the state owns everything tend to move much more slowly than capitalist societies. It is true that the USSR bears little relation to the kind of state-socialist society that would result if, say, Norway slowly started nationalising industry more and more. In a more functional and prosperous socialist society than the USSR, the state would have plenty of resources, and there would be plenty of skilled engineers and technicians available to help in the invention of all sorts of brilliant new technologies – including better electronics, better building materials and life-saving medicines. Nevertheless, since there would still be a manufacturing monopoly, all the products that reached the public would be blandly identical and very dull. Moreover, it seems to me very possible that, even if the state was working for the common good in such a society, the overall tendency would be towards inertia. Perhaps not. But we can be certain that in state-capitalist societies, where new enterprises are constantly being created, and technological innovation carried out by the state (in universities or government-run science organisations (like NASA or the CSIRO)) is injected into a dynamic maelstrom of competing businesses – each of which seeks to make the new technology as efficient and glamorous as possible – that dynamism and progress are the norm. This fundamental dynamism of our economic system is the reason why technologies like the computer have metamorphosed and improved so rapidly, and why we have so much choice as consumers. It may be true that this dynamism of capitalism is part of what makes it so vicious and makes workers so vulnerable within it (constant competition, prices forever fluctuating, stocks forever oscillating, companies rising and falling). Even so, I don’t know if we want to throw this aspect of our society away; the moral benefits of the progress we make as a species probably outweigh the moral costs of unemployment and inequality etc.

If this analysis of state capitalism as the more dynamic system is correct, and we regard this to be a strong objection to state socialism, that only leads us back to thinking Norway is the telos – that is, unless anarcho-syndicalism could provide that same dynamism and rapid change. Luckily for anarcho-syndicalism, I think it might actually be able to. In an anarcho-syndicalist society, all enterprises would be ‘public’ in some fundamental sense (the profits of a given company would never go above the level needed to pay its workers, update its facilities and productive equipment, and perhaps hire new workers)[8], and yet there’d be thousands of these enterprises, some of them very big and strong (but never using their size to exploit workers, because the internal democratic structure would prevent it). So, ultimately, the prices of – say – two different computers should be roughly equal in an anarcho-syndicalist society (both producers are paying their workers the same wages), but consumers could make the choice based on quality alone. New enterprises could also be set up relatively easily, with only a little money for since no enterprise would really have a cost advantage over another – just the ability to produce greater volume.

All in all, therefore, my conclusion is that anarcho-syndicalism should be the telos. Nobody should advocate a revolution to get to it, but we should regard it as our Star of Bethlehem nonetheless.

I’d like to finish by juxtaposing Popper and Chomsky one last time.

Popper was really an arch pessimist in so many ways. Some of his misanthropic quotes are so brilliant: “The race of men are liable to degenerate”; “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.” If I was the sort of person who put quotes on the wall of their bedroom, these are the kind of aphorisms I’d have on my wall.

Although Chomsky would never put such things on his wall, I am sure he’d still accept them. Despite his reputation as an idealist, Chomsky, of all people, must know these statements are right. As a boy, he was victim of vicious anti-Semitic bullying at the hands of the Irish Catholics who dominated the neighbourhood in Philadelphia, he grew up when Hitler was on the rise in Germany and lived through the revelation of the Holocaust, he lived through the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he lived through McCarthyism, he lived through the Vietnam War, he was briefly imprisoned for resistance during this war, he was an official enemy of Richard Nixon, and he has spent his life inveighing against atrocities committed by great powers against vulnerable peoples, along with all other kinds of tyranny and injustice, which has exposed him to hostility, marginalisation, censure, opprobrium from thousands of rabid critics. Yet at the same time as seeing the truth of these statements, I think Chomsky recognises the unacceptable nihilism of Popper’s attitude. As he says,

“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”

---

[1] Admittedly, this might be near-impossible. Ever since Reagan and globalisation and the loss of manufacturing jobs, the American economy has become highly financialised. This means that the American GDP is actually largely reliant on Wall Street and trading. Obviously, America is also in massive debt – not only the government coffers but everyday people, mainly because of the way financialisation has transformed the banking sector. No longer do banks bother with reserves; they just create virtual money out of nothing, underwritten by the ‘Too-big-to-fail’ government insurance policy. And since you can effectively ‘sell’ loans to investors in the form of bonds and securities, there’s no limit on bank lending, which means no limit on debt, which means no limit on house prices, and with an extremely risky trading system full of leveraging and ‘repackaging’, that means no limit on crashes. There’s also the problem that the entire Western social security system that was introduced when the world turned Keynesian was unsustainable in the long-term. It was not plausible that generation after generation could retire in their sixties and live comfortably thereafter unless you had a stable population and continuous growth. 

What all this means is that introducing a new New Deal is going to be really hard and, if it happened, would involve a lot of pain as the economy struggled to transition back to a pre-Reagan manufacturing-based system.  

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

[3] I have made the case for this (based on Thomas Ferguson’s “Investment Theory of Party Competition” and Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent) in my previous essay on libertarianism. Also, the Youtube channel “Libertarian Socialist Rants” has two excellent videos about this.

[4] To use Larissa MacFarquhar’s phrase from her capricious and mostly inaccurate 2003 profile of Chomsky.

[5] I think Chomsky’s right when he points out there is barely any evidence for most evo psych claims; most of them are ultimately based on assumptions, both about the life of Palaeolithic humans and about the ‘adaptivity’ of almost every behaviour we see in more than one culture. At our current state of knowledge, the truth is we have very little idea how many of the traits we see in humans today are what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin would call “spandrels” – accidental by-products of other changes that were selected for, necessary because of architectural constraints on our brains, energy constraints, the intricate ways in which genes and gene complexes interact in creating something as infinitely complex as the human brain, or perhaps the general idiosyncrasies of the biological and physical laws of our universe. In fact, this last factor must be very significant: certain attributes of human beings must be what physicists call “emergent phenomena” – i.e. systems of new complexity that arise out of a simple arrangement of matter, like the intricate crystal of a snowflake or the wetness of water (which somehow comes about when lots of H20 molecules hang out together). The strange thing is that everyone agrees that there is a fairly large domain of human behaviour that is manifestly not amenable to selectional accounts. One obvious, oft-adduced example is our ability to comprehend the abstract number system; another might be our bent towards mysticism and spirituality and creating Gods. In trying to explain the existence of such behaviours of human beings, everyone will say, “Maybe once the brain gets to a certain size, or you get a certain arrangement of neural matter, these kinds of things are just inevitable.” The problem is it’s very hard to really know what is and what isn’t like this.

Chomsky thinks language itself is like this – that it has not evolved for communication but instead suddenly arose just before the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of circa 75,000 years ago (i.e. causing the Great Leap Forward). Chomsky regards language as, essentially, a system of “externalised thought”. Though people like Pinker think this theory is mere romanticism, no-one actually knows if he’s right or not. Moreover, there is some evidence for Chomsky’s claim in the structure of language itself. For example, there are many aspects of syntax that seem to be optimised for computational efficiency rather than communicative efficiency, and the fact that even basic words don’t really ‘refer’ to objects in the outside world (unlike standard animal communication) would seem to impugn the communication thesis. Chomsky also makes the interesting point that the phrase “Evolution of language” is itself misleading, since language doesn’t evolve; human cognitive capacities do. He’s right that it is extremely difficult – in fact, currently impossible – to explain how we could have gone from a highly primitive communication system like that of any other animal to a language – a totally different kind of thing, with strange properties like complex syntax and discrete infinity and so on – through gradual, step-by-step processes. Perhaps language is just like a snowflake in the brain.

As far as I can tell, most serious philosophers of mind and cognitive psychologists now agree that, even though the brain does have a fairly significant degree of plasticity in childhood and adolescence (important functions can sometimes be relocated in the case of brain injury), the structure is best described as “massively modular” i.e. composed from birth of various micro-faculties, each performing subtly different functions that would not be performed as well by other modules. We have long ago identified the large faculties in the brain. We know where vision is processed (the back of the brain, in the occipital lobe), we know where emotions come from (the limbic system and the hypothalamus), we know where memories are created (the hippocampus), we know where higher level cognitive processing occurs (the frontal lobes), we know where spatial reasoning occurs (the parietal lobes) and we know where the language faculties are (Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area). The reason I bring this up is that evolutionary psychology requires that the mind be massively modular. If the mind was the way ‘empiricists’ and postmodern feminists like to conceive of it, i.e. a hunk of protean putty highly responsive to experience, then that would make it almost impossible to say anything about specific adaptive traits. As I suggested, evolutionary psychologists are probably right about the general structure of the brain (there are probably further modules within the big faculties). But even if the brain is massively modular, it doesn’t have to be massively massively modular, with every last circuit fixed in place by a genetic code that was wholly selected for. In fact, it definitely isn’t. The brain is not the sort of thing that you could just make a tiny change to and expect only a tiny result. Small mutations in the genes that code for certain brain structures could trigger a kind of butterly effect, since the changed protein would be interacting with lots of others in a very complex arrangement. Who knows how that would affect the brain or how the new structure of the brain would affect behaviour?

There are really so many subtleties to tease out when looking at the evolution of human traits, and evolutionary psychologists never do this. Of course, this is not to say that we can’t be confident about some things being selected for. It seems impossible to doubt (and Chomsky himself does not) that our emotions were largely or wholly selected for, given their very important social function and the fact that other animals have similar emotions; that our basic moral sense was selected for; and that heterosexuality and the strong male sex drive were selected for. Unlike Chomsky, I am also very strongly inclined to believe that Pinker is correct when he says that male violence and male dominance are adaptive (given archaeological evidence, historical evidence, what we know about testosterone and game theory).

On the other hand, like Chomsky I believe that Pinker is insufficiently wary of “just-so” stories and the flimsy evidence that underlies most Darwinian ‘explanations’. You just have to look at Pinker’s work to see that. In How the Mind Works, Pinker devotes the last few chapters to ‘explaining’ basically everything about human social, romantic and sex life. He reels off story after story for behaviours we see in humans today (Why are young men hotheads? Why are men sexually jealous? Why are men so promiscuous? Why are women regarded as chattel in all primitive cultures? Why are women less promiscuous and more picky? Why are men only attracted to younger women but women can be attracted to older men? Why are we selfish? Why are we altruistic? Why are we mainly altruistic to our family? Why are not quite so altruistic towards our siblings? Why do we demonise and essentialise people outside the tribe? Why is purity so important to primitive peoples? Why do we care so much about status? Why does love exist? Why do we prefer natural beauty to ugly cities? Why do we take photographs of areas with lakes and mountains? Why do we take photographs of flowers? Why are contemporary art and contemporary classical music so unpopular? Why do we intuitively think there’s a ghost in the machine? Why is science so hard to get your head around?) and states the answer as if it was as clear as day, usually on the basis of what you would expect of a Paleolithic person according to game theory. To be fair, he does have some empirical evidence for a great many of his claims – I think his chief empirical source on human social relations is Donald Brown’s book Human Universals, which purports to show that men are nasty and promiscuous in every culture, that women are chattel in every primitive culture, that in every culture the moral norms are similar, and that in every culture we have the same modes of thought and categories. But Pinker also largely ignores evidence that doesn’t conform, and he also leaves out a vast domain of human behaviour. That is why evolutionary stories are often called “just-so” stories; they just take a behaviour they can see in the world, and give it some kind of explanation. It doesn’t matter if there are a huge number of people who never do this behaviour; it doesn’t matter if this behaviour is slowly dying out; it doesn’t matter that the behaviour might be a spandrel; and it doesn’t matter that human beings have the power to suppress some of their intuitions and their sex drive.

It should matter. In fact, I believe this point about us having the power to suppress our base instincts is quite damaging to simplistic Darwinism, for it shows that humans are ultimately too complex for their behaviour to be wholly reduced to a series of adaptive traits. As soon as one thinks about actual human lives, this reveals itself to be true. Take the example of a Medieval monk. As men, Medieval monks would probably have been disposed towards promiscuity and greed. However, as servants of God, they also would have been endowed with the power of self-control (strong frontal lobes). This meant that they could take control of that impulse and be pure. In much the same way, the moral philosopher Peter Singer may be naturally inclined – as the descendent of hunter-gatherers – to be altruistic only towards his family and friends. However, as an enlightened 21st Century citizen, he can use the neocortical power of reason to see that that is irrational, and that he should extend his altruism out further. Likewise, a young, unpopular teenage girl may be naturally inclined – as the member of a social species of primate – to crave status. However, as a thoughtful adolescent soul, she can recognise that it doesn’t really matter and decide instead to just be happy doing things she enjoys.

Although Pinker would regard this as a moot point, since I’m still acknowledging that the “primal” impulses are there, I believe it actually leads to a contradiction. If Pinker believes that self-control and reason were selected for along with the base impulses, then that means one thing that has been selected for can override another thing that has been selected for. That implies that evolution has selected for one thing to defeat another selected thing. Logically, that suggests that they can’t both be selected for. Therefore, “selected for” is a worthless term. Now, you could argue that the theory actually accommodates this seeming contradiction, perhaps because self-control and reason are only ‘weakly’ selected for, and this is proved by our need to train them. But even if you grant that, my argument still proves that saying certain things are “selected for” and other things aren’t gives us zero insight into human nature itself. It certainly doesn’t really explain human behaviour. It doesn’t explain saints, it doesn’t explain weeping for your dying grandmother and it doesn’t explain the exhilaration of listening to Tchaikovsky (name your sublime experience). As Chomsky and Jerry Fodor have both said, literary fiction is a far richer source of insight into human nature than cognitive psychology. Although this might sound like classic humanities nonsense, one cannot deny that we are a unique organism and that ‘culture’ marks us out in a fairly profound way. As soon as we entered the cognitive niche, we did to some extent step out of Darwinian selection, since we learnt how to adapt to our surroundings and effectively ‘control’ our emotions. Pinker too often forgets that we are unique in this way (and we shouldn’t forget the other reasons to be sceptical about using Darwinism for everything).   

Here’s what Chomsky says about Pinker’s and Dawkins’ evolutionary psychology in the book The Science of Language, in which he converses with a McGill University philosopher called James McGilvray:

“There are several different questions here. What is the nature -- what is human nature, or ant nature? Well, those are scientific questions. Separate from that is the question of what role selection had in developing them. And those are just two different scientific questions, not to be intermingled. Part of the problem with the kind of pop biology that's common today is they're just intermingled -- it's assumed that if there's a nature, it's got to be selected. It doesn't make any sense -- it doesn't make any sense for the kidney or the visual system or anything else, and it doesn't make any sense here.

There is a nature, undoubtedly. People who argue against it for a blank slate -- that's just puffery for a popular audience. It doesn't mean anything -- nobody ever believed in that who was sensible. So yes, there's a fixed nature and it developed somehow, but we do not know for any aspect of it (whether it's the chin or the visual system or the bones in the ear or whatever it may be) -- we don't know the answer to how it evolved until we know the answer. And the answers when we find them will often be very surprising. So there's no issue here about whether natural selection operates -- obviously it does -- but there are some very big questions about the *channel* within which it does, and about other factors involved in evolution, of which many are known. So we have to separate totally the kind of rhetorical posturing about selection and the question of intrinsic human nature.

Well, there is recent work -- like, say, on kin selection, Hamilton's work -- which suggests some plausible evolutionary basis for kinds of what appear to be altruism. But it's pretty narrow. If you pursue kin selection to its limits, you're going to have a hard time explaining why humans devote enormous energy and take tremendous risks to save dolphins but don't care how many children are dying in Africa. Something else is happening. It's interesting work; I don't want to denigrate it. But the results that have some human application come down to the fact that I'm going to pay more attention to my children than to my nephews. We didn't need biology to tell us that, and it doesn't really tell us much beyond that. And it also doesn't tell you why I'm going to pay just as much attention to an adopted child as to my own children -- and take the same attitude towards it, even though I know it's adopted. [Nor does it tell you] why many people care more about their cats and dogs than they do about their children -- or take dolphins, which are the classic case. So it just doesn't get us very far. It's interesting work and we learn something about insects and other organisms and something about social behaviour, but very little about humans that has any implications.

We know in advance that that's going to be true. Science deals with simple questions. It can't deal with questions that are beyond the borders of understanding. We kind of chip away at the limits.

[...] To some extent, there are other factors that enter into it which cause it to be misleading. Many of these people, like Dawkins, regard themselves very plausibly as fighting a battle for scientific rationality against creationists and fanatics and so on. And yes, that's an important social activity to be engaged in, but not by misleading people about the nature of evolution -- that's not a contribution to scientific rationality. Tell them the truth about evolution, which is that selection plays some kind of a role, but you don't know how much until you know. It could be small, it could be large; it could [in principle even] be nonexistent. We have to find out. In the few cases where something has been learned, it's often very surprising, like the evolution of the eye. What appears to be the case is completely different from what has been speculated for centuries in biology, and the same is true of many other things -- it could be true of human language. So there's nothing wrong with sociobiology or evolutionary psychology -- the field that Kropotkin basically invented -- but it has to be done seriously and without pretense.

JM: There are some specific hypotheses -- let me just pursue one. Robert Trivers suggested back in the seventies that cooperative behaviour could have evolved among biological creatures that are often conceived, where biologically unrelated, to be essentially selfish. He assumed that cooperation could have evolved among biologically selfish creatures if it were generally to involve reciprocity -- when x does something for y, x can expect something in return. The result is a back-scratching conception of cooperation and social behaviour. Trivers' work has been given centre stage by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists. They have suggested that -- in a way reminiscent of utilitarian thinking -- that his form of reciprocal altruism offers the key to understanding the biological basis of morality. As I understand your view, you do not think of humans as essentially selfish. You think of people as capable of -- and getting satisfaction from -- aiding others who are not kin and not even tribe, and cannot be expected to reciprocate. Furthermore you do not think that neo-Darwinian selectional stories exhaust what can be said about the biological foundations for language and perhaps for other domains. Are there alternative, non-Triversian biological grounds for morality, and does something like Humean sympathy offer such an alternative ground?

NC: Trivers' work is quite interesting. I don't think it gets us very far. I don't think it explains why people are willing to support the system of social security that's going to give a disabled widow across town enough food to survive -- or the fact that we care more about dolphins than we do about people pretty near us who could help us. It just deals with a very small topic. It's interesting; and there are game-theoretic approaches that try to work out the consequences. All that's fine and should be done. But does it yield conclusions of human significance or scientific interest? Well, not of human significance as far as I can see. Of scientific interest, yes, but within a very narrow domain. Are there other human capacities that enter into our moral nature? I just don't see how that can be doubted. We know too much from our own experience and intuition; it shows that there's a huge domain -- in fact, virtually all of human action, thought, and interpretation that doesn't fall within this category.

Is there some other evolutionary explanation for the rest of it? No. But that's true of almost everything. There's no evolutionary explanation for bee communication, or the most elementary questions of how simple organisms function -- nematodes, for example. So yes, of course, science shines often penetrating light on extremely simple questions. One of the reasons that physics is such a successful science is that it is granted the unique privilege of keeping to questions that are extremely simple. If the helium atom is too hard to study, you give it to the chemists. Other fields don't have that privilege but deal with the level of complexity that you're presented with, and as a result they're very shallow by comparison. In these areas -- evolutionary explanation -- we're just groping in the dark for the moment -- there aren't good ideas, even for much simpler organisms.

So all this work is fine. If you can achieve some plausible confirmed scientific results, everybody applauds; and there're no issues. What are its implications for human life and society? -- well, that you have to investigate, and I think when you do, you find them extremely limited. Hume's and Smith's assumptions are, I think, much more plausible and lead to suggestions about how to behave in the world that are far more reasonable -- and in fact that we adopt all the time.

[6] I’m assuming anarcho-syndicalism doesn’t have to involve the abolition of money. I have thought through the possibility of abolishing money – instead creating a world with tiny localised, collectivised economies which produce fixed rations for everyone, and trade only at a community level with other communities in a pure process of barter and exchange – but I quickly concluded that it was highly undesirable. As I just implied, you can only abolish money within tiny, self-sufficient communities in which everybody is resigned to staying put forever. Without money, you have no choice, no freedom and there’s no potential for any innovation or new enterprise or anything. A world without money would be horrible. It just doesn’t work for a complex society. That’s obvious as soon as you ponder it. (Despite these truths, I have seen at least one self-described anarchist/libertarian socialist on the internet who said that money would be abolished in his ideal society – which just goes to show how dangerously stupid left-wing radicals can be (which is why I take Popper seriously).)

[7] This was fine for the Catalonians because they were living in tiny, self-sufficient communities.

[8] Each enterprise would be fully democratic, so no choices could be made without the consent of everyone. There would thus presumably be competition among companies for increasing internal democracy (in order to entice workers), rather than over cost-effectiveness.

As I imagine it, there’d also be democratically structured regulatory bodies – or perhaps regulatory unions – that would prevent big companies employing ‘monopoly pricing’ and that would force such companies to invest left-over profits into the community.