Stage 4 starts when the organization has managed to transition from a bunch of crazy utopian hippies to a solid organization capable of repeatedly mobilizing a significant amount of resources and deploying them quickly and effectively. In other words, when it starts to be perceived as a force to be reckoned with. A parallel in the corporate for-profit world would be the time when the organization has enough leverage to start engaging in lobbying.
At this moment the organization will start to openly act as a global actor pursuing social and political change in a similar way that the environmental movement seeks more protective legislation and the free trade lobby seeks to dismantle the existing ones. The organization will engage in more varied interventions than movements and lobbyists typically do. On top of influencing political institutions or organizing mass protests, it can engage in more direct actions. For example mobilizing communities and simpatisers living near areas of struggle about natural resources. It can also engage in direct actions of wealth distribution, both geographic and class distribution, through it’s conglomerate of transnational corporations.
On the other hand at this moment the population that clearly and consciously favor an anarcho-communist society are still a minority.
Therefore at this point the organization should start acting as a transnational political actor with the following strategic considerations:
First and foremost, expand the window of opportunity.
Move away from authoritarianism and promote expansion of civil > rights including freedom of speech, freedom of organization, > freedom of civil disobedience and freedom of whistleblowing.
Avoid premature extinction due to nuclear war or other > catastrophes.
Second, reduce the social acceptance of repression and weaken the > mechanisms of oppression. Those are different from the first > point in that the first point refers to the legal framework and > the second point refers to the social perception and the > logistical capabilities. A society could advance in the first > point but still have a large number of police and a large number > of incarcerated population if it believes for example that is on > grave danger from some minorities, or abstract threat like illegal > drugs, and that the response to any trivial violation of the law > should be imprisonment. This point is about making people realize > that a lot of issues that are now dealt through criminal justice > should instead be treated with social programs, that people should > be helped out and not repressed, and having the amount of police > and prison populations reduced. This should help people be > authentic and express their beliefs, concerns and differences with > the government and the power with less fear of repression.
Third, reduce poverty in the western countries, increase quality > of life and financial security as much as possible for the least > privileged. Reducing poverty is key to strengthening democracy. > Poor people often don't even have the legal right to vote, and > when they do they are likely too busy, lack tools to become > informed, and are easily influenced by reactionary narratives that > scare them from losing what little they have from labor reforms, > immigration, or other perceived threats. Poor people are likely to > fear even more proposals for systemic change, since those might be > perceived as even riskier. Eliminating poverty should help reduce > newsworthy scary crime and reduce the fear that moves the middle > class to support ever more authoritarian governments.
Fourth: make liberal capitalism work for the 99% instead of 1%. > This might seem like a contradiction. A lot of collectives that > aspire to a radical alternative to the current system are trying > to make it fail. Especially the ones from revolutionary > traditions, both Marxist and Anarchist alike. Ironically though, > usually the people who are more critical of the system, and those > who dream up alternatives, are those who allegedly benefit the > most from it. Radical philosophers and activists usually come from > the wealthiest families. Even more the children of the rich than > the new rich themselves. Those who don’t have to worry about the > necessities of life, and from an early age can reflect that “this > system is filling up my stomach but emptying my soul” and decide > that there must be a better way. History has shown that when > people are wealthy and idle they tend to think more about how to > make the world better and contribute to a change in society. > Therefore the strategic proposal is not to keep people away from > poverty through constant redistribution of wealth, but instead by > social devices, similar to the ones that were built after World > War II, to keep people away from socialism, and then were > dismantled in the 80s when the threat of socialism faded: > universal health care, universal education, universal sick leave > and unemployment benefits, generous retirement packages, etc. The > counter-intuitive argument here is that making the capitalism > system work for everybody, since it is an economist system, will > make more people sick of it, in a similar way to what happened > with the hippies in the 1960s. The difference is that this time > there will already be a global functioning viable alternative to > switch to, and it will prevent a fall into nihilism. Doing the > opposite, hindering the current system on which billions of people > depend on, on top of being immoral, would place the proposed > alternative in the category of vanguard elitism, of privileged who > can see society from outside, who are “othering” the oppressed and > telling them what to do, instead of helping them achieve their > goals and decide for themselves. This time the policies should be > better than the welfare ones in the post-WWII period, since those > still allowed for a lot of poverty.
Fifth, popularize rationality in decision-making. For example > make government decisions transparent, make budget allocation > based on cost-benefit analysis instead of political hustling. Add > rational decision-making, critical thinking and data literacy in > the basic education curriculum.
Sixth, avoid polarization and promote diversity. Avoid the > perception that the organization wants to impose their > philosophical perspective on everyone and instead advance the > perspective that a diversity of populations with varied > philosophies like liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism, > etc, is healthy and that the government should serve all of them, > in the same way that a diversity of religious or gender identities > are healthy and not impositions.
Seventh, promote global solidarity. Wealth in the western > countries has been accumulated at the expense of the rest of the > world, where western powers have promoted authoritarianism and > conflict to facilitate the plundering of natural and human > resources while dumping there the residues and pollution from the > wealthy. This trend should be reversed to facilitate the > globalization of human flourishing and happiness. People in the > western world should be made aware of the situation and their > economies transition to fairer ones for the people who live > outside of them.
At this stage the organization should start to unabashedly publicise their bid for cultural hegemony. This is important because there is a significant portion of the population that have very weak philosophical and political affinity and who tend to align, often unconsciously, with whatever side seems stronger. This is a well-known phenomena and a main reason why political propaganda tends to be so triumphalist, often quite delusional.
Therefore the organization should avoid the pitfalls of delusion and confrontation in political propaganda. Confrontation helps in the short run to mobilize one’s supporters against the supposedly imminent existential threat posed by their neighbors, friends and family members who think and vote differently, but in the long run it goes contrary to the goal of promoting peace and diversity, and makes it much more difficult to extend bridges and collaborate with political forces of people with opposite views.
The core of the propaganda should be open-arms humble bragging. It should highlight the evidence that the organization is the most cost-effective positive influence on earth which is helping enormous amounts of people. Point out that it’s own members are having quite nice lifestyles, and they don’t go to the extremes usually associated with transformative organizations, of disgusting levels of wealth in the philanthropy world or disturbingly precarious lifestyles in the social activism world. And that everybody is welcome to join the new world of confederated communities.
Even though not everybody is interested in measurable facts, it is essential that the organization establishes Key Progress Indicators (KPIs) to assess whether or not it’s advancing on its goals, and if so how fast, in order to be able to continuously improve on the strategy.
Those KPIs will also be very useful to reach out to data-minded people from other ideologies and hopefully convince them to change their mind, or at least take the organization seriously and collaborate with them.
The most important KPIS will be those that directly measure the goal of contributing to human flourishing, happiness and fulfillment. There are standardized questionnaires for measuring that. Despite valid concerns about self-reported data, they seem to be the best way discovered so far and allow easy comparisons with other cohorts. KPIs could also measure other things that are usually associated with higher quality of life. Examples:
Reported overall life satisfaction, happiness, fulfillment
Number of people at risk, or disadvantaged, that have been helped > out of that situation
Hours of labor per year
Days of vacations per year
Time devoted to artistic, cultural, intellectual, spiritual pursuits > outside work
Diversity. Market societies tend to favor a very narrow set of > population, mostly white cis-men with analytical and delayed > gratification skills. During the first stages the profile of the > community members will likely be rather similar to that, since > members will be recruited from the privileged in the current > society. By stage 4 however, that should have shifted considerably > already, up to the point that diversity should be statistically > significantly greater than among the elite in the market society. > A particularly interesting diversity factor to study will be the > delayed gratification. Psychologists use the famous “marshmallow > test” to predict with high accuracy if a child will be successful > in a market economy. The test measures delayed gratification by > giving a marshmallow to a kid and offering to* double it if they > refrain for a few minutes from eating it. Then the adult leaves > the room with the child alone with the marshmallow. Those who pass > the test are much more likely to succeed in adulthood. Success in > market economies hinges on an individual's ability to save money > and invest it in housing, education, health, and so on… but in > pro-commons communities such decisions can be made communally and > the success of the individual should not depend on their capacity > for managing delayed gratification.
The positive evolution in time of those KPIs and the projections for future improvements should be highlighted.
A second set of KPIs should be designed to convey that this new ideology is no longer a fringe idea, but that it is rapidly gaining popularity and is poised to become hegemonic in the near future. Not only people but existing institutions are increasingly adopting it. Some examples could be:
Percentage of people in an area living in pro-commons communities
Percentage of people in an area employed by the organization, either > directly, or as freelancers, or indirectly working at a company > that has significant business with the organization
Percentage of people in an area in the waiting lists to join the > community or work at the pro-commons firms, and compare that to > those aspiring to be civil servants (the most popular option among > the youth in some western european countries) or work in the labor > market
Percentage of people in an area that would likely be influenced by > the organization, in case of organized voting, protests, etc. It > would include all the above plus customers, suppliers and > simpatizers that have shown support through participating in > funding events, sharing posts by the organization, etc.
Percentage of housing units, industrial warehouses and farmland > belonging to the organization in those areas.
Percentage of the economy managed by the organization, including > both the formal economy in legal tender (euros, dollars) and the > equivalent market value of the alternative, mutual support, > economy that would include volunteer activities such as childcare, > cooking, doing repairs, gardening, etc.
Percentage of prodigal young adults who have grown up in the > communities, gone out to explore the for-profit world, and came > back to support the project. This is the best metric to > distinguish a successful innovation with future projection and a > self-deluding sectarian group. Often idealistic parents have built > up alternatives that look lovely to them, but they feel so alien > to most people that nobody else wants to join and even their own > children want to leave to the standard society. Sometimes that is > masked by brainwashing children and denying them contact with the > outer world. It is key therefore that people who grow in the > community are told about how the outer world works, given tools to > succeed in the for-profit labor market, and encouraged to try a > professional career outside the community. Armed with that > experiential knowledge then they will be able to freely choose > which side they want to support. Will they see the community as a > bunch of crazy idealists? Or will they see the outer world as a > pile of absurdities?
Percentage of passed legislation that has been influenced by the > organization, at different governments.
Those KPIs could be displayed for different geographic areas. Presumably by the start of this stage community members and supporters will already be the majority of population in some small towns with big settlements, and already a considerable percentage of the population in small counties. At the State level, economic area level, and global level they will still be negligible in terms of population, but still the data could be presented in compelling ways focusing on the growth tendency.
Also the whole economy of the pro-commons communities and pro-commons enterprises could be compared to that of transnational corporations that are household names. Some of them don’t have that many employees or revenue. Even if at the beginning of this stage the pro-commons economy might not yet be comparable to Fortune 500 companies, it still might be presented in an impactful way comparing it positively with companies that might rank well below that.
Also, in order to highlight the ambition and viability of becoming state actors the pro-commons world could be compared to State economies, first to micro-states like Andorra, Liechtenstein, or Monaco, and later to bigger States with more population and territory.
On top of the above quantitative bragging the propaganda should include some qualitative analysis. It should emphasize the high quality of life that the members of the community enjoy, with shorter working hours, longer vacations, regular stays at beautiful resorts at the beach or by the ski trails, etc. Also highlight the much higher efficiency of the pro-commons economy pointing out that all that relatively lavish lifestyle is maintained with a much lower per-capita income that would be required in a market, for-profit, capitalist economy.
On top of that emphasizing how much more freedom people have in a pro-commons network of community compared to a market economy. People can just change their community at will, changing their residency to any other place in the world. This is one of the failed promises of the market economy since often the costs associated with selling one’s home and buying it again elsewhere are too high for most people. In a pro-commons economy also there is much less stuff to move around. Cars, bicycles, electronics, furniture,... none of those need to be moved since they are collective goods. Finally the network can help with the bureaucracy of State residency paperwork whereas in the market economy individuals are typically left on their own to find a job in the other State that would sponsor them a visa.
Propaganda should also include examples on how collective decision making works better to manage psychological biases that in market economies tend to harm people. For example, in the area of diet and health, in market economies there is a tension between the desire of people to make profits that leads them to promote low quality, high-carbs food, and the desire of individuals to eat healthy low-carb fresh foods. Managing this tension often implies a high psychological cost and a loss of emotional capital or health. In a collective pro-commons environment however there is no such tension. People can eat at the collective eateries which are designed to maximise people’s health. This can be done without imposition, or loss of individual freedom. Less healthy comfort food with high carbs and fried stuff can still be available, just not so prominently, so that it requires a conscious effort to go for them. Also the community could promote a culture of seasonal festivities where it’s encouraged to eat with such excesses, like many traditional cultures have done, to help individuals pace themselves, and keep their craving for comfort food for special occasions.
Response to a pandemic could also offer material for advertising. In the market economies the response to the covid pandemic was harmful to a lot of people. The most vulnerable were the most affected since they couldn’t afford not going to work, and they were very likely to either suffer from loss of work due to lockdowns or suffer from covid because they would lose their job if they abided by the lockdowns. In pro-commons communities people don’t need to commute much to get their jobs done, and pandemics can be managed much better. Settlements can easily isolate themselves with little negative impact to people since they have many of their supporting attachment relationships in the same settlement. Traveling between settlements could be easily dealt with by testing. People who would have to commute to work can lock themselves in with the security that the community will provide for them if they lose their jobs. As a consequence people in pro-commons settlements should have much lower incidence of a pandemic, without needing to lockdown nor being forced to take experimental drugs rushed through approval processes.
Up to this point the criteria for entrepreneurship and investing has been purely to maximise near- and mid-term economic profits in order to use them as power to advance the project.
When the organization has succeeded at building a global conglomerate with deep pockets and solid growth it should start considering a second variable to optimize as well: the number of people impacted. This is a longer-term investment strategy that takes into account the positive feedback that can be achieved through influencing the people impacted by the conglomerate. They can be targeted with alter-systemic propaganda and a fraction of them converted to supporters. Even if their support is in soft forms, like becoming customers and employees of companies of the conglomerate, or voting one of the options endorsed by the organization, the large numbers that can potentially be reached would make a huge difference and be worth the investment.
This is not a novel idea. Attempts by employers to influence employee’s political views have been documented forever. The idiom “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” has been recorded as early as 600 B.c. by the Greek poet Sappho. We can find contemporary examples such as the giant telco Verizon asking their USA employees to write to congress to stop a tax rise proposal, which was reported by The Intercept on October 14th, 2021. When the pro-commons enterprises employe a large number of people the same pattern can be used to influence workers to push for legislation that favors the commons rather than the markets.
Therefore the organization should intentionally buy or build companies that either or both employ lots of people or retail to lots of people. Obvious examples are restaurants and fashion clothing stores which do both. Each one of the commercial venues should be, at the same time, a propaganda center, where people can obtain resources (books, stickers, clothes with slogans, ... ) that support the cause.
Other interesting sectors can be construction, cleaning, and manufacturing. They don’t have retail storefronts that can be used to deliver propaganda to potential customers, but they tend to employ a lot of people.
Another hiring criteria should be to prioritize the people who want to work the least amount of time possible. People who want to have reduced working hours and extended vacations. This will allow the distribution of work among the highest number of people possible. Notice that this does not mean to pay people more per hour. The wages are set by the market. A given firm can choose to pay a bit above the market average to help retain labor, but not too much otherwise it would no longer be competitive and it would have to close. What this criteria means is to prioritize hiring people who themselves prioritize having more time for themselves, what is now called a better balance between work life and personal life, instead of people who prioritize working as much as possible.
OTOH it is possible for a company to pay more than the sector’s average if they change the nature of work. The companies can invest in automating more of their processes and training their staff to do more complex work, so that they become more productive and then they can be compensated with higher pay. There is a common misunderstanding among workforce organizers that automation and productivity improvements hurt labor. Worker’s unions have often fought against investments on automation fearing loss of jobs. Reality normally works in the opposite directions. Jobs are lost in companies that don’t invest in automation because they stop being competitive and they have to close. Paradoxically jobs tend to increase in companies that invest in automation because they get a bigger share of the market, and the market also increases. More automation allows lower prices which means more people want to buy. Even if that wasn’t the case, even if in a specific situation more automation would reduce employment in a particular firm, it would increase the wages of remaining workers and the profits of the pro-commons organization, which would invest them in creating more employment elsewhere.
On top of helping gain supporters, massive employment also reduces the discontent that feeds extremism and populism. I.e. it reduces the amount of people who would support very opposite views endorsing authoritarianism, use of force, nationalism, racism, xenophobia, misoginy, homophobia, etc.
Historically authoritarian regimes have often come about as a popular reaction to economic discontent. Typical causes for discontent are difficulty finding jobs, difficulty of paying for life necessities even when employed, and perception that foreigners are hoarding jobs and government benefits. Employment strategies like the ones just discussed should help mitigate those.
Furthermore the employment strategy could target specifically cohorts who are more likely to endorse authoritarian ideas. For example it could explicitly target armed civil servants like the military, the police and prison guards. Also armed people who work for private companies as security guards or mercenaries. People in those jobs are often recruited among the most vulnerable population and given very low salaries. On top of that, they are embedded in a highly hierarchical system and often a very misogyny and racist work culture. Sourcing among them should enable the organization to expose people who are at high risk of supporting authoritarianism to alternative ideas, and convert some of them. Which in turn would expose their friends and families to alternative ideas and further weaken the case for authoritarianism.
In order to attract them the organization should offer training to different kinds of jobs, maybe construction, repairs, manufacturing, etc. with prospects of better salaries, career opportunities, less risk and good social perception.
Governments often use police to address social issues that are not related to crime. Police might be sent out to help on conflicts involving people with mental health issues for example. Sometimes those encounters end up badly because the agents don’t have appropriate training. However, increasing the police force is usually cheaper than increasing the number of social workers with training to deal with issues such as mental illness and poverty.
Sourcing a large number of people who work in the police and military forces, and sourcing from the same pool of people that would potentially be recruited in the future, should put upwards salary pressures on those sectors. If hiring armed civil servants becomes more expensive, hopefully the governments will reduce their numbers and instead consider more favorably other ways to address social tensions arising from poverty and untreated mental health issues. Many people who work as armed civil servants are highly motivated at serving society. Some of them might be interested in being re-trained as social workers, which would increase the pool of potential hires and make it easier for the government to expand those programs.
Another interesting cohort to tap into are criminals. There is a high rate of recidivism among people who have been convicted of crimes. Social stigma and lack of marketable skills make it more difficult for them to find legal occupations which favors recidivism. Giving them support such as training, money, and therapy could help them transition to the legal economy. This in turn would reduce the amount of crime, the need for police, and the sensation of danger that is often a component for authoritarian regimes. A similar case can be made for sourcing among undocummented people and beggars.
As the organization grows bigger and global it can consider using some of the social impact budget to develop communities outside of the western wealthy countries, and build new ones instead in some of the poorest regions of the world to promote a different kind of development path.
It is worth considering that one of the issues that creates social tension and drives authoritarianism is economic and political migration. Millions of people are driven to attempt migrating to western countries due to difficult economic situations or widespread violence in their place of origin.
Such tension could be mitigated by establishing businesses and hiring at the source of migration flows. Alternatively, when setting up businesses at the origin is not possible due to political constraints or high levels of violence, those could be setup instead along the migration paths. The interventions should include communal settlements so that they also serve to promote the alternative society that the organization is envisioning at a global level.
When those settlements are established and vibrant the organization should offer to help migrants who are already established in the western countries to move to those. Although those who have already established ties will probably not be interested, people who have been forced to move away and still have significant ties to their place of origin might be interested in going back, or moving closer to there, if they are given guarantees of economic prosperity.
Therefore when prioritizing interventions globally the potential of reducing migration tensions in the west should be balanced with the potential for economic improvement, and not necessarily prioritize the poorest regions in absolute terms, but prioritize the regions that have more migration potential instead.
Another symbiotic way to invest in community and economic building in challenged areas is to prioritize those rich in natural resources. Very often such regions have very weak institutions that are conducive to let a small elite benefit from the extraction of resources and are unable to invest the profits for the benefit of the collective, in infrastructure and economic development. As a result the locals livelihood is contingent to the exploitation of natural resources.
Interventions could be devised in such critical areas to build alternative economies, and communal settlements, that are not dependent on the extraction of resources. When those interventions succeed it should be much easier to promote environmentalism among the local population and enroll them in programs to protect forests and stop fossil fuel extraction.
As the global economy moves increasingly online and remote work becomes more common, more and more westerners are finding it attractive to move to developing countries where the cost of living is cheaper and the weather is nicer.
The choices are rather limited though due to prevalence of violence, lack of quality medical care and lack of reliable internet connection in many of those regions.
When the queue of westerners interested in joining the pro-commons communities grows large it should be worth exploring potential settlement areas outside of the western countries. It should be possible to acquire large extensions of land at much cheaper prices than in the western countries. It might even be possible to negotiate favorable conditions with the nation-states controlling those territories. The concept of governments establishing free regions, where people and companies are exempted from taxation and enjoy a looser legal framework in exchange for promoting a new economic hub has a long historical tradition. There is also the newer precedent of Charter Cities, an idea by Nobel of Economy prize winner Paul Romer. He proposes to create new cities in developing countries that mimic the success of places like Singapore or Hong Kong. He’s managed to get some governments interested but apparently the funding hasn’t arrived yet. The organization proposed here could offer both the funding and the deployment expertise. Instead of big cities though it would propose a cloister of smaller communities which might be less palatable to governments since there aren’t recent success stories to look up to.
Also at this stage the organization should start fostering the presence of their members in powerful non-democratic countries. Many of them are open for business to a certain point and that should enable the organization to build communities there and have the entrepreneurs of those communities mingle with the elites of the countries, cultivate friendships with them, and find sympathetic ears for the ideas of social transformation among the local elites.
There seems to be a growing interest in living in communities among people who otherwise have ideologies that favor the market. There are companies who sell a community experience targeted at young people which includes private living quarters in a big building with shared areas such as collective kitchen, living room and coworking spaces. There are also offers for gated communities which target young couples with children and emphasize shared spaces like playgrounds and swimming pools.
The organization described here which is on one hand promoting actual communal communities and on the other building a global conglomerate of diversified businesses would obviously be uniquely well positioned to compete in the “community experience” market.
Therefore it should offer packages that include all the common life’s necessities: housing, utilities, food, clothing, computing, phone and traveling. The offer could have different tiers, with cheaper ones limiting access to smaller or less centric housing, less travel distance, etc. and most expensive ones offering bigger quarters, more centring, more trips to more touristic destinations, more powerful computers and phones, etc. All the offerings should include, and encourage the possibility of shared spaces like eateries, entertainment areas, parenting areas, coworkings and so forth.
On top of the potential for revenues this model offers an obvious propaganda vector. People interested in fake community life could potentially be nudged to become interested in more authentic community experiences. I.e, people would likely purchase such services thinking about the community and their people as a commodity in the liberal framework of exchange for mutual benefit. The experience of interacting with other like-minded people might help them create bonds spontaneously but they might lack the conceptual framework for building real communities, with real commitment towards one another, with shared wealth and so on. At the same time, being customers of the community services will make them captive audiences who can be informed of the advantages of real communities. Those who show interest should be helped to transition from the “community-as-a-service” model to moving to one of the communal settlements.
Apart from the explicit advertisement potential this model offers an implicit valuable educational experience. Bening customers of such a service allows them to give up the daily struggle for purchasing every life necessity, to constantly have to think in terms of cost-benefit, to constantly assess the utility given by a product or service against it’s price, to worry about insurances for house and car that cheat people with small print that exclude them when they need them, to worry about maintenance and repairs for their homes and vehicles, etc. This experience, when compared to their previous experience or to present experiences of their peers who are not in the fake communities as service will likely make them less keen to support a market society.
Another synergy of this model is that the organization can recruit workers for their various companies among the customers of the fake communities as a service. They can offer a job and a compensation that combines the community as a service package plus a salary, and they should be able to do that with a very competitive advantage, since they should be able to provide those services at a cost significantly lower than their market price, in effect offering a much higher equivalent salary. Of course those jobs could be converted to volunteering for the community for those people who become interested in having the full communal community experience.
There aren’t many referents in the anarchist literature on how to influence the government to facilitate the goal of anarchism. Most authors consider influencing the government to promote anarchism a contradiction. Looking at historical events, the most prominent is the CNT participation in the republican Spanish government during the time of the Spanish Civil War, and that is regarded by most anarchist authors as a mistake as well.
Implicitly or explicitly then most anarchist authors envision the relationship with the government only in terms of opposition and conflict. They assume that the governments will try to stop the anarchist projects and therefore the anarchist communities must build resilience and escalate tensions until the governments collapse. They often call for boycotting elections.
That view seems extremely naive and unrealistic. Given today’s governments power and espionage capabilities it’s impossible to build any clandestine movement that would be able to stand a chance opposing them. Also politicians don’t tend to see the world in terms of existential threats as the anarchists do. They tend to be more pragmatic and willing to accomodate anybody that would help them get elected.
Indeed it is easy to find ideas for policies that would be politically palatable to sections of the political spectrum represented in the institutions. Anarchism is ultimately about decentralized bottom up organization, and not all political forces support centralization of power. It would be quite feasible to identify policies that would help decentralize power and find political parties that would push for them in exchange for some form of support.
There are however some proposals in the anarchist tradition that propose participating in the institutions. Some examples are Social Ecology / Municipal Libertarianism (Bookchin) and Inclusive Democracy (Fotopoulous). Both identify the potential to support pro-commons enterprises from the government, but both limit their endorsement of participating in the government at the municipal level. That is highly problematic given the current trend towards centralization of power to distant governments. Nowadays municipal governments have very little power in terms of legislation or taxation and therefore the support they can provide is relatively tiny. It would be economically much more advantageous to have access to central governments and tweak the rules for tenders that would apply to all levels of governments in order to increase the chances of the pro-commons enterprises, for example.
Another characteristic of such proposals is the idea of dissolving the representative government and replacing it with a direct democracy. This is also problematic because it is violent to force people to use a democratic system that they don’t want. The same way that is wrong to force representation on those who want a direct vote it is wrong to force those who want representation to have to engage in every issue to cast their vote.
Influencing institutions could take three different stages:
Prepare a list of desired legislative changes and lobby all the > parties with representation to support them. Instead of offering > money as lobby currency offer votes: the organization will use > it’s propaganda machine to tell voters about which parties are > helping the most the transition. The organization should have > reports updated periodically with the percentage of support that > each one of the parties have given to their program, ideally > broken down into several categories for better impact. Possible > categories could be: power decentralization, repression > reduction/civil liberties improvement, wealth distribution, > non-market economy, etc. The data should refer to each party’s > recent votes on those issues. The promises that parties make, > especially during electoral campaigns, should be ignored, and the > message to the supporters of the social paradigm shift should be > that past voting patterns are predictive of future ones and also > that we are asking their votes to show gratitude to the > politicians and parties that have supported them in the previous > term.
Participating in existing political parties. Becoming a registered > member of a party is usually a very small investment with a high > return. It allows party members to vote on the internal candidates > that will ultimately run for elections. That vote is much more > valuable than voting in the real elections since there are much > fewer voters. The organization should negotiate with the internal > candidates to include support of their legislative ideas in their > programs and ask their supporters to register as members of those > parties and vote the internal candidates with whom they’ve reached > a deal. Alternatively the organization might want to promote their > own internal candidates.
Finally, once the support in a certain voting district is strong > enough to guarantee that their own candidates will get elected, > the organization could create their own party and run their own > candidates in the elections. This would be useful if the existing > parties have dynamics that block some of the proposals from the > organization.
It should be clear that the goal is not to win the state elections and dismantle the state. That would almost certainly trigger a military offensive by the USA who has spent enormous military resources during the last century to masacre any regime that deviates from the liberal orthodoxy of competitive markets in a global economy. The goal is to gain as much power as possible to promote the alternative ideology worldwide, and wait until it has become hegemonic, to abolish the states, or reduce them to the territories occupied by the fringe populations that still want to live in a market-states system.
Policies to overcome the idea that one has to “earn their life” by working on the labor market. A combination of providing universal free services from the government to all the citizens and providing a universal income that would allow everybody to pay for whatever necessities are not provided for free and have something to spare for pleasure. Examples of universal free services: health, education, housing and utilities, nutrition and transport.
Legalize free speech. Legalize criticizing the government, the system, and planning to replace it with a different system. Remove penalties for engaging in acts of civil disobedience, and when not possible, at least minimize the penalties and legalize talking about commiting crimes, so that preparations can be done in the open, or in closed doors without fear of repression from government spies. For example it should be possible to talk freely about breaking into private property and squatting to protest for unaffordable housing. Another popular civil disobedience proposal is to take products from big retailers without paying for them, in retaliation for their perceived exploitation of labor. While such acts of civil disobedience don’t seem very constructive, people should be able to freely engage with them, and face the chance of individual fines for petty theft, rather than being worried of being convicted for some collective crime with harsh penalties like conspiration or terrorism.
Policies to reduce the amount of armed civil servants. Military and police. First, remove the conditions that cause the tensions that justify them. Stop colonization, both through military occupation and support of authoritarian regimes puppets of western countries and comercial colonizations through subsidies to western companies that make companies in development countries uncompetitive. Governments often subsidize companies with the excuse of promoting cheaper products. Subsidies distort the market, stifles innovation and destroys developing economies. Instead give money to citizens in need and let companies compete for citizen’s money. Also legalize everything that feeds the mafias, feeds crime, and justifies police: legalize and regulate all drugs and sex work. Invest in social services in key areas were social tensions are likely to end up in violent conflicts that summon the police such as support for people with mental illnesses or addictions. Also give easy access to quality housing to people who want to live alone since often domestic violence arises from situations where people feel economically forced to live together since they can’t afford housing separately.
Reduce the amount of people incarcerated. Offering universal access to life necessities should already reduce crime a lot. When that’s not possible, change the law to focus on helping people have the skills to be able to contribute to society rather than punish them for their failure to do so: therapy, work training, and so on. Help people that come out of prison to re-socialize to reduce recidivism. In general, switch from a punitive to a supportive paradigm.
Instead of waiting for refugee crises to explode, reduce immigration tension by supporting populations at origin and helping them go back with guarantees of good jobs and housing when the situation at their origin improves.
Remove the coercive nature of elections. Western democracies typically have a duopoly of parties or an oligopoly of three parties. Voters are coerced to vote one of them instead of their true preference with the threat that otherwise their vote will be rounded off to nothing.
Eliminate the d’Hondt law and similar rounding and financing laws that protect the big parties. Don’t even round down to the number of seats available. Let every party receive all the votes that have been casted for them and allow the parties to make coalitions based on those real votes. Seats should be allocated to each coalition proportional to the total number of votes to the coalition and leave up to them how to distribute them among the coalition partners, rather than pre-allocating the seats based on each party’s results.
For the actual votes in the chambers each coalition should have the number of votes they receive, not rounded down to the number of seats in the chamber. Even parties in coalitions too small to get one seat should be able to vote in the chamber proportionally to the number of votes they received from citizens.
Also remove the threat of elections having to be repeated if no party or coalition gets an absolute majority. Let governments be formed by the largest simple majority. Remove the circus of budgets having to be approved every year under the threat of a government shutdown. Make the budgets more dynamic. Proportional to the tax revenues and with relative allocations for different purposes. The budget will be automatically recalculated every month unless there is a simple majority vote that amends it.
Make elected officials accountable and recallable. Force people who run for election to submit a notarized version of their program and don’t allow them to campaign on anything that is not in the program, or to misrepresent the program in the campaign. Have them automatically removed if they deviate from the program, and, as a fallback, have a mechanism for voters to recall their elected officials if they perceive they are not doing a good job, even when they are not automatically removed for technical reasons.
As discussed earlier, conventional environmental policies centered on energy efficiency are generally useless and often backfire. They encourage using more energy since they reduce the cost of consuming the service that uses energy, and therefore they render that service more desirable.
Environmental policies should therefore focus on reducing extraction of fossil fuels. For those governments who don’t have a significant amount of fossil fuels in their territory, policies should aim to coerce countries to reduce theirs. That can be achieved by imposing import taxes to countries that extract them and don’t take measures to reduce the output. Or even voting to remove them from international institutions. On top of that, in order to improve the coercive effect and be fair, the same pressure should be exerted on other countries who themselves don’t extract fossil fuels but refuse to participate in the coercive measures towards the producers.
On top of that, subsidies for fossil fuels should be removed. Subsidies for renewaval energy should be directed to consumers that need them, rather than to producers. Also, they should take into account the whole life cycle of the product, from extracting the materials, through manufacturing, usage and retirement. Otherwise, if a product uses renewable energy for it’s use, but creates a lot of pollution during its manufacturing, maintenance or retirement, it is not really a green product.
Most governments are really weak when it comes to tax rich people. In fact most governments essentially act on behalf of rich people taxing the poor and redistributing the wealth to the rich.
Economic policies should aim at reversing this situation. Reduce and if possible remove all universal taxes which are effectively the taxes to poor people. VAT, social security, all kinds of government fees that everybody needs to pay at some point, etc. Instead tax the wealthiest, their income and their wealth. Don’t let the wealthy transfer wealth outside of the country unless it’s attached to an investment that is taxable in that country. Simplify tax law to eliminate loopholes for the rich.
Protect individual citizens and small enterprises by making them exempt from esoteric laws that only benefit big corporations. For example, intangible rights (copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets).
Promote government ownership of key infrastructures and lease that to private companies for their exploitation. The same concept that now is used for electromagnetic bandwidth, that is considered a collective resource managed by the government and leased to private telcos could be expanded to other areas. Still in the telecommunications sector, the government could own antennas in urban areas, and lease them to private companies, rather than each company having to put their own antennas. In transport, governments should own the roads and rails and lease them to companies that operate trains and buses, rather than giving away the management rights to private companies. All those infrastructures need maintenance which can be either done by companies owned by the government or given to private companies through tenders.
The same concept applies to real estate. It doesn’t make sense that lucky private owners benefit from the plusvalues and rents of properties that happen to be in neighborhoods that become trendy thanks to government planning and citizen’s creativity. Therefore the government should collect 100% of taxes on real estate surplus and benefits from rent above the cost of maintenance. This will prevent people from using real estate as a deposit of value, which drives up the price of housing and commercial venues. The government might want to have a program to buy them back and lease them directly.
A similar reasoning can be applied to proprietary online platforms that become coercive by virtue of their huge size. Social networks are one example where a few successful companies can get all the advertisement benefits because they dominate the market. Another example is gig economy platforms used for work like food delivery, car driving, room rentals, etc. a few quasi-monopolies are able to extract huge fees from workers due to their market power. Legislation could address that by mandating the use of standards, in the same way that communication like email or SMS is standardized which prevents the abuse of monopolistic power.
When considering labor legislation take into account the double function of labor. On one hand there are positive aspects:
Some work needs to be done for society to operate.
Working is a way to gain experience which is the best way to become > valuable in the labor market. Some people even pay for working, > for doing law practice for example.
On the other hand there are negative aspects as well.
Work is tedious and therefore people want to do the minimum amount > possible. Otherwise, if it was fun, people wouldn’t pay for it, > since people would do it for free, just for the fun of it.
Often people work for the economy rather than to provide value for > other people.
Given these considerations, the government should avoid taxing people just for the privilege of working, since that would make it difficult for people to invest in their own working experience and become valuable workers.
Government should instead prevent people from being coerced to work, with policies discussed earlier like free services and unconditional income. If people are not forced to work then the government doesn’t need to intervene to regulate minimum wages since people won’t work if what they get in exchange is not valuable. Absent coercion to work market forces will put pressure to automate as much work as possible, which will reduce the amount of tedious work and increase the amount of more valuable, more well paid, work.
However the government possibly can have a role to play in helping work to be distributed among as many people as possible. Hiring, training and managing people has a significant cost for firms which pushes them to want to have the minimum number of employees working as many hours as possible. Governments can create incentives that offset those economic constraints like taxing working more than 20h per week or more than 9 months per year.
Finally, protect consumers by making advertisements illegal. Advertisement is based on exploiting human psychological biases. Instead of advertisement a public listing of available products and services with their pricing and availability should suffice. Also make it illegal for companies to package and label their products, which is also exploited for marketing purposes. Flashy coloring and bogus claims like “healthy”, “premium”, or “prize winner” are the norm. Instead packaging and labeling should be regulated, with the government issuing the labels with objective criteria like clear nutritional facts, objective quality rating (most products should, by definition, be “average”, very few should be “premium”). Also instead of misleading brands the labeling should display the names of the people who will get most of the profits from the sale.
Presently global institutions are mostly a sham run by the USA to reinforce their global hegemony and maintain a collection of authoritarian client states servient to the western powers.
Global policy should be aimed at changing this situation. Alternative global institutions should be created with the participation of actually democratic governments who will send their elected and recallable delegates, not appointed representatives. In this way an alternative global power structure will be formed which will be already part of the bottom up governance proposed to replace the current nation-states.
Such global institutions should be tasked with actually tackling environmental issues, promote disarming and peace, and promote actual democracy instead of authoritarianism.
One of the few things that can be done legally by a state actor and not by transnational corporations is to spy on the rest of the world. Gaining enough power in some states should enable the establishment of spying programs for investigating the planned hostilities of other state agents against the proposed social paradigm shift. That information will be tactically very valuable for dealing with those actors.
At this stage one new financial instrument can be added to the mix: getting some shares of the conglomerate listed in major stock exchanges.
There will still be many people who will still find that the best way to contribute to building the alternative society is by working in a major corporation and redirecting part of their income and professional knowledge to the pro-commons communities.
Many of them will be offered to save money for retirement through investing in the stock market and getting tax discounts on that.
Shares could be offered in the stock market as a retirement vehicle. A certain number of shares could be made equivalent to a residency in the communities and some monthly allowance. There could be different tiers similar to those discussed on the section about selling the community experience that would correspond to a different amount of shares.
This product would be highly competitive and attractive not only to supporters but also to people with different ideologies who just want a good deal for their retirement. Investing in normal companies listed in the stock markets have risks. Their future price and revenues fluctuate with the economy, and some of them can even collapse, leading to people losing their savings, like it happened with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Also people might end up living longer than expected and run out of their savings. The shares offered here would be much safer, it would be tied to the communal ownership of housing units and farming land, as well as health and wellbeing centers, which would guarantee the accommodation, feeding and caring of the investors for the rest of their life.
If the strategy works as planned at some point in the not-so-distant future there should be a large number of big pro-communal communities spread all over the western world and some more in the rest of the world.
That large number of organized people should make them a key constituency for the governance of each country and give them the ability to negotiate almost complete sovereignty for their communities, excluded from most of the laws of those countries, which in turn should foster the social transformation even more and help it grow faster.
Soon after that the proposed ideology should start becoming majority in some states. When the power held in the USA is enough to guarantee that there won’t be hostilities, such states can start declaring themselves dissolved. They still can maintain the formalities of a state in order to participate in existing global institutions, treaties and so forth, as long as they still have any value. But they no longer will be top down governments attached to markets. They will be recallable delegates from community confederations that operate on communal economies.
The more people see that the alternative is possible and it works, that people have much better lives and are not threatened militarily, the new paradigm should spread much faster and soon become hegemonic among the western states.
As for the rest of the world, which means the majority of the population and territories, by then hopefully they will have become much more democratic, thanks to the measures outlined before, both from the pro-commons organization and from state governments. Wealthier communities in the former western states should now have many more resources, since they will be free from the shackles of market economy, and will be in a much better position to help the ones in poorer regions of the world. That in turn should help them transition to the new paradigm.
Finally there will be just a minority of remaining state actors. Those hopefully won’t feel threatened by the global confederation of communities thanks to their non-belligerent ideology. Therefore there should allow a somewhat free movement of people between them which will help propagate the memes of the new society, and eventually those will become hegemonic on those last states as well.
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