define the relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the capitalist, and because I am a capitalist, with spe- Exodus cial converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century see that they are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role im- posed upon me by the state. Nay, I will go further, Kevin A. Carson and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more se- cure.54 If the “true” socialist is grudgingly forced into this bargain from the realities of the situation, another kind finds the servile state or collective capitalism positively appealing. In him the exploitation of man by man excites no in- dignation. Indeed, he is not of a type to which indig- nation or any other lively passion is familiar. Tables, statistics, an exact frame-work for life these afford him the food that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupa- tion most congenial to him is the “running” of men: as a machine is run. To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly ap- peals…. Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so suits his pe- culiar temperament…. But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he does for the socialisation of the 2021 54 Ibid., p. 143. 60 ganization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy.”52 In addition, the oligarchies governing theoretically oppositional institutions frequently wind up, in actual practice, engaging more cooperatively than adversarially with the institutions whose power they were originally intended to limit. Hilaire Belloc speculated, in The Servile State, on the likelihood of such a de facto coalition between a “socialist” state and the capitalists whose power it was in theory put in power to supplant with working class power. Belloc noted the tendencies, in particular, in the Fabian move- ment of his time. The genuinely principled and egalitarian sort of socialist, he wrote, might desire to dispossess the capitalists of their power and their property in the means of production. But they would find their path to this end blocked by the political re- alities of the situation, and would find themselves instead diverted in a completely different direction. This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the cur- rent of his demand canalised. As to one part of it, con- fiscation, it is checked and barred; as to the other, se- curing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open…. …[A]ll those things in the true socialist’s demand which are compatible with the servile state can certainly be achieved.53 The devil’s bargain offered by the servile state is summarized in the words of an imagined capitalist: …“I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catas- trophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will 52 Ibid., p. 365. 53 Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1912, 1977), pp. 143–144. 59 diverted Neotechnic technologies into the less efficient channel of mass-production industry, and rendered it artificially profitable through subsidies and state-enforced cartels.50 What’s different to- day is that micro-manufacturing technology is making small-scale production so much more comparatively efficient, even over and Contents above its previous superior efficiency, that the political power of the big corporations is no longer sufficient to suppress or coopt it. It would be pointless to tick off all the other specific libertar- Reviews 8 ian socialist, libertarian communist, syndicalist, and revolutionary anarchist tendencies in the same regard. In every case, the ideol- Abstract 10 ogy by its very definition entails the insurrectionary seizure ofthe Preface 11 means of production, if not of the state, by mass action. And its central focus, accordingly, is on the mass political party or mass industrial union. Part One: Background 13 Social Democracy. Social Democratic parties exhibited essen- tially the same tendencies as the Leninist vanguard party — both Chapter One: The Age of Mass and Maneuver 14 before and after taking power — toward bureaucratic oligarchy. I. A Conflict of Visions .................... 14 In Political Parties, Robert Michels analyzed the functioning of II. The Triumph of Mass in the Old Left . 25 the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” within all large, hierarchical institu- III. The Assault on Working Class Agency . 78 tions. “By a universally applicable social law,” he wrote, “every IV. Workerism/Laborism . 91 organ of the collectivity, brought into existence through the need for the division of labor, creates for itself, as soon as it becomes Chapter Two: Transition 96 consolidated, interests peculiar to itself.” Since the state “cannot I. Drastic Reductions in Necessary Outlays for the Means be anything other than the organization of a minority” or ever “be of Production ..................... 96 truly representative of the majority,” it follows that the majority II. The Network Revolution and the Imploding Cost of will never be capable of self-government through hierarchical insti- Coordination . 106 tutions based on indirect representation.51 To summarize: “It is or- III. The Impotence of Enforcement, and Superiority of Circumvention to Resistance . 131 50 For an extended discussion of this process, see Carson, The Homebrew In- IV. Superior General Efficiency and Low Overhead . 138 dustrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (Center for a Stateless Society, V. Conclusion . 145 2010), Chapter Two. 51 Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, with an introduction by Seymour Martin Lipset (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999), p. 353. 58 3 Part Two. The Age of Exodus 147 tenacious struggle with capital, hand-to-hand, in ev- ery shop, with direct mass pressure, with strikes and Chapter Three: Horizontalism and Self-Activity Over with the creation of its own permanent representative Vanguard Institutions 148 organs.48 Introduction . 148 I. The New Left . 151 Our assumptions regarding technological history are quite dif- II. Autonomism . 167 ferent from those of vulgar Marxism. As we will argue in the next III. The 1968 Movements and the Transition to Horizon- chapter, the radical shift towards cheapening and decentralization talist Praxis . 181 of production technology from the late 20th century on has ren- IV. The Post-1994 Movements . 186 dered obsolete both the mass production industrial model and the Old Left focus on centrally-directed mass organizations. But that Chapter Four: The Abandonment of Workerism 213 is not to say that large scale production was ever objectively nec- I. The Limited Relevance of Proletarianism in the Mass essary. Even in what Lewis Mumford called the Paleotechnic Age, Production Age . 213 large-scale steam-powered industry was simply one path that sup- II. Technology and the Declining Relevance of Proletari- planted alternative paths that might otherwise have grown out of anism . 216 the possibilities of the Eotechnic technologies of the late Middle III The Abandonment of Proletarianism by the New Left . 217 Ages.49 And it supplanted it, in large part, through the power of IV. The Abandonment of Workerism in Praxis . 236 the Paleotechnic coalition of the state, military, armaments, cap- italist landed interests and extractive industries. Small-scale, dis- Chapter Five: Evolutionary Transition Models 243 tributed machine production was arguably always technically fea- Introduction and Note on Terminology . 243 sible, absent the political power of Paleotechnic gigantism. And the I. Comparison to Previous Systemic Transitions . 245 introduction of Neotechnic technologies like electrically powered II. The Nature of Post-Capitalist Transition . 272 machinery made small-scale production incontestably the most ef- ficient form. Unfortunately the allied forces of state and capital Chapter Six: Interstitial Development and Exodus over Insurrection 293 48 Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” Die Introduction . 293 Rote Fahne, December 14, 1918. Hosted at Marxist Internet Archive <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm>. Accessed I. The Split Within Autonomism . 296 May 30, 2020. II. The Shift From the Factory to Society as the MainLo- 49 This technological periodization comes from Lewis Mumford’s Technics cus of Productivity . 298 and Civilization, runs from the Eotechnic period of the late Middle Ages (sophis- III. Negri et al vs. the Commons . 303 ticated development of clockwork and water power by the craft workers of the free towns and monasteries), through the Paleotechnic (a group of technologies IV. Theoretical Implications . 305 growing out the institutional coalition described in the text above, culminating in steam power, coal and steel), to the Neotechnic revolution of the late 19th century (primarily associated with electrically powered machinery and internal combus- tion engines). 4 57 ing class, organized politically. There was no room for even the Chapter Seven: Interstitial Development: Practical Is-