The Rise of the Cooperative Economy, cont.
The Evolution of Revolution
If you take a look at the history of human society, however, you will note
that there are remarkably few distopias, and the ones that did exist
disappeared over the course of a couple of generations. The Communists would
have said that the reason why such regimes don't last is because the
discontent of the workers will eventually cause them to rebel, taking down
those in power to replace them with the next stage in evolution, the
proletariat. The fact that Communism itself has been overthrown in most
technologically sophisticated parts of the world would suggest that they were
wrong. Capitalism's response is that the desire for the advantages that wealth
brings eventually proved too great an incentive, and threw off their bonds in
the pursuit of freedom. It's my thesis that this is almost as absurd an idea
as that of Communism itself.
Social revolutions occur only under very unusual situations. We tend to
think of revolutions as taking place when an oppressed minority has had enough
and takes it upon themselves to revolt. Yet historically, there are very few
such revolts that have ever succeeded, and when they did, they often ended up
putting into place a nearly identical system with new titles and leaders, but
which typically ended up proving to change the lot of the oppressed only for
the worse.
To understand where revolution does succeed it's instructive to go back to
the Permian era, some three and a half billion years ago. Life existed, but it
likely existed in the form of primitive microbes (called eukaryotes) that
consumed methane produced from venting magma interactions against the bedrock.
One of the waste products of these microbes was carbon dioxide, which was in
turn passed into the atmosphere. Over time, however, the buildup of carbon
dioxide forced such life ever farther from the originally methane filled
atmosphere.
Some microbes, however, were able to adapt to higher and higher amounts of
carbon dioxide in their system, and in time a new species emerged that could
actually catalyze carbon dioxide as an energy form. This microbe spread
rabidly, occupying most of the surface world. Ironically, it's waste product
was oxygen, which would have been deadly poisonous to methane breathers. Thus,
in the process of expanding into a new niche, it both made the world
uninhabitable for the previous generation of microbes (except perhaps, if some
new theories are correct, deep within the earth's bedrock layer), and
established a foothold that has held until the same kind of process created
oxygen breathers. In the latter case, the two types of organisms (which we
think of rather naively as plants and animals) developed into a symbiotic
process, where the waste product of one domain of creatures served as the fuel
for the other.
One of the most noteworthy feature of this is that the transition between
methane and carbon dioxide breathers probably occurred very rapidly, perhaps
within a few decades (after dominance by methanogens over tens of millions of
years). A second was that the CO2 breathers didn't compete against the methane
breathers -- they utilized a resource that the methane breathers couldn't, and
one that was in fact produced as a waste by-product.
There are some rather eerie parallels here between this war of slimes and
sludges and most successful revolutionary struggles. Some have argued that the
end of the feudal ages arose because muskets could kill a mounted and armored
rider. However, a more likely cause seems to have been the introduction of
Arabic numbers and a new system of accounting. Prior to then, the nobility and
the church managed to maintain a symbiotic relationship. It was an uneasy
symbiosis, because both were vying for the same limited resources (land and
people), but each offered something that the other couldn't provide -- the
nobility providing strength of arms and martial training, the church
controlling the moral development of the populace and providing a measure of
cultural continuity.
Merchants were a part of this equation as well, but were largely discounted
by both sides because most merchants didn't have much ability to communicate,
or perform transactions outside of their immediate domains because there was
no standardized way of performing transactions. Coinage existed but its value
fluctuated dramatically from village to village, and accounting was hampered
by the use of the archaic Roman numeral system.
Persian traders, on the other hand, figured out far earlier a much more
effective accounting mechanism that incorporated the notion of zero and
negative numbers. European merchants often accompanied knights heading to the
crusades, and realized quickly when interacting with the far wealthier Islamic
merchants that the system of accounting that they used made it much easier to
keep the books, and provided a more effective mechanism for comparing value
(and for communicating this value to traders). This made the rise of the
merchant class possible -- individuals who didn't have the traditional measure
of status that the nobility had (ancestry, divine heritage, right of arms,
etc.), but who did have a different status symbol (money). This extended their
area of influence so that they weren't bound as strongly by local
considerations as the landed nobility was, and which in turn changed the rules
of the game. The nobility that were successful became merchants themselves,
but most of them were destined for obscurity. I find it not at all
insignificant that the British House of Lords relinquished their voting
privileges at the turn of the millenium -- even they recognized that the
merchants had won.
A more recent example of this (and one which is still playing out) is the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia is a very interesting case study in
revolution, of course. In many ways it was the last major feudal state -- the
merchant class had never really managed to break the hold that the nobility
and the church had there, in part because of the difficulties in maintaining a
trade network due to the distances and harsh weather. While some efforts had
been made to modernize Russia, the Czarist state maintained as tight a control
on information flow as possible. It took someone from the outside (Lenin, who
had studied in Germany and England for a number of years) to shake things up,
and he did so by using the improved communications systems that existed in
Europe to create his network, and also managed to get the fledgling merchant
class in Russia on his side (ironically). There were in fact two revolutions
that occurred within a couple of years of one another -- the first toppling
the Czarist Russian state by the nascent merchant class and the Communists,
and a second one in which the Communists wrested control from the newly
created democratic assembly by force of arms, in essence a revolution followed
by a coup.
Seven decades later, it was a different information paradigm that changed
the face of Russia. Fax machines, modems and computers that made their way
into the hand of knowledge workers in countries like East Germany, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia so that they could operate effectively in the competitive world
markets also provided a way to communicate for these same workers, who were
well educated and modestly successful but who were not a fervent part of the
ruling class. Increasingly open communication systems both made it possible to
spread the meme of creating a revolt and a way of bypassing the tight security
that existed as part of the more traditional arena -- the revolutionaries were
largely adapting to a new environment that lay outside the sphere of the elite
power structure.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic end of the Cold War, and
the Capitalist powers swiftly rushed to embrace East Germany into the fold of
"civilized" nations, mistaking the desire to break free from Communism as an
open acceptance of Capitalism. However, it is perhaps symbolic that the ones
that largely made money in such an environment were drug runners, smugglers,
and black marketeers, and that the new monied class in Russia (especially) is
the Russian Mafia. Most Russians like the freedoms that come from the demise
of Communism, but disliked the rapacious nature of the Capitalists that came
to exploit the new market.
A more instructive future, though, is to look at Hungary, the Czech
republic, and Finland. All three at one time had been part of Russia's orbit,
and in all three places the revolutions that replaced the power structure came
from a new class of people -- university educated knowledge workers that had
access to new communication media, and that had a healthy distrust of the
dominance of American culture in the technological sphere. The citizens of
Prague, long considered a center of culture, replaced a Communist strongman
with a playwright, Vaclev Havel, and the Czeck Republic is gaining a new
reputation as a leading light in the information age.
Finland is perhaps one of the most startling examples of this revolution,
because it has been such a quiet one. Never tightly bound to the Soviet Union,
Finland realized the futility of attempting to upgrade their World War II-era
infrastucture and instead jumped directly to the information age. They were
one of the first countries outside of the United States to take advantage of
the Internet, have produced a national hero of Linus Torvald, the creator of
Linux, and have shaken the large American telephone companies by pushing
wireless technology that makes most of what's in America appear quaint in
comparison, and is energizing the European Internet community to go in a way
that's radically different from the American approach of large, expensive
computers connected to phone networks.
The Finns have also brought another sensibility into the world of the
Internet, one that ultimately will have a more profound effect on world
society than their push into wireless technology -- they have made it possible
to contemplate a society where money as we know it has ceased to exist, and
where your worth is tied directly to your reputation.
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