Dear
friends and comrades,
Below is my
first attempt to elucidate the thinking behind and the sources in political
practice and struggles and movements worldwide at the basis of my Cosmopolis
proposal. If you have not yet seen my proposal for a universal constitutional
order intended to provide a specifically political order to our collective
current and recent practices, struggles, initiatives, commoning activities, and
movements, it is attached to this email message, and can be found at the blog:
21stcenturycosmopolis.blogspot.it.
My hope is
twofold: that this will generate a widespread discussion and debate about what
alternative institutional orders we can imagine and work for to get out of
capitalism and free ourselves from the existing state powers and global governance
tyrannies, and to provide a political and eminently practical vision of how our
many initiatives around local subsistence like food and water sovereignty,
commoning practices of all kinds, fair trade, living wage campaigns,
alternative universities, renewable energy, immigrant and refugee rights
campaigns, antiwar movements, and of course direct democracy movements like
Occupy can be connected into horizontally linked but completely sovereign
political form consistent with our principles of common ownership and
management without capital or the state, ecological sustainability, equality,
freedom of movement, and an end to exploitation and prisons.
Steven
What the Cosmopolis proposal is meant to
accomplish:
The
proposal for Cosmpolis is my attempt to address the perceived need for a political project that takes the
lessons of Occupy, Indignados, the Arab Spring movements and other revolts
since 2011 into account. It is also meant to address the discussions about what institutional or political form the
commons can take, or how it can horizontally develop a full social order or “constituent
power” that can also remain constituted.
I wanted to
also explore some questions in a practical way:
How could national borders be abolished, yet not
lead to a capitalist feeding frenzy for exploiting labor power globally?
How can that
national state be “deconstructed” with as little violence as possible and without opening the door to slavery,
local notables or global corporations taking over power – that is how can
we avoid fueling the anti-state rhetoric of corporate and capitalist power and
neoliberal discourse while still being able to fight against the power of the
state on behalf of a different political power that could control these forces
of exploitation?
How could
we deal with violent behavior, breaking of the rules of commoning, abuses or
violations of people, theft of common goods and services (privatization),
enslavement, violence against women and children and other dangerous actions without prisons or the death penalty?
How could direct democracy actually run or
govern society, rather than receding into mere discussion groups leading to
disaffection or alienation?
How can commoning practices and forms of commons be
coordinated, linked to each other, be made to be mutually reinforcing, in a
horizontal way that does not leave it informal and open to attack politically
from institutions? How can these practices as a constituent power become the
institutional order?
How can we move away from a view of human beings as
predominantly economic, rational, game-theory type actors, acting on self-centered individualistic interests
to one that presents a different view of people consistent with the what is
best in the humanist traditions, but avoiding the Euro-centrism, sexism and
other limits of how that project was historically developed? In particular I
wanted to revitalize the idea of people as political actors, as citizens in
Aristotle’s sense, but in a universal way.
Finally, I wanted to answer a problem that is at the
very center of our world today: the problem of human rights and of belonging to
and membership in a community or society.
This is raised
by Hannah Arendt in the chapter “The National State and the End of the Rights
of Man”, and more recently by Giorgio Agamben. Arendt and Agamben make clear
something that is more evident today than ever: that “inalienable
human rights” are not worth the paper they are written on if you have no way to
enforce them. If you must depend on your national state, you are at the
mercy of that state, or at the mercy of other states and their willingness to
let you in and defend your rights. Since your own national state is more than
likely the one you are afraid of, and since as Arendt shows the international
community is likely to stigmatize refugees more than to sustain them. In any
case, refugee status is precarious, it is not citizenship.
I believe
that today, part of global capitalism’s “moral
order” is based on the idea of “humanitarian intervention” – that NATO, the US
or the UN Security Council will intervene militarily to protect your human
rights by bombing your country or destabilizing your country in reality
putting your life and security in greater danger than before.
I have avoided the use of the term “rights”
entirely in the writing of Cosmopolis. The entire project depends instead on two other bases: first, on
what Arendt correctly addresses as the only “right” that matters – the right to belong as a citizen to some
political community that one knows can be counted on to defend your rights,
or to be free to go to some other
political community that you can be a citizen of; and what Julie Wark in “The Human Rights
Manifesto” and Peter Linebaugh in the “Magna
Carta Manifesto” identify as the one right that counts and without which all
others are null and void – the right to
subsistence, that is to the commons. These two “rights” are best thought of
as practices as Peter calls them and so “citizening” and “commoning” need to be
universally available and enforceable by the very people who do them.
I have
addressed that need as I have the other questions I raised above through the two key institutional
mechanisms of Cosmopolis: city
sovereignty and universal citizenship through
free movement and the stipulation of acceptance of new arrivals and of citizenship after a 90 day residency period
(echoing, but speeding up the “one year and one day” laws of medieval cities).
This is the
commons plus immigrants if you like.
This leads
to me explaining the principle
institutional feature of Cosmopolis and why I think it is where we should put our specifically
political efforts, the city (and the more rural township qua city as a less
densely populated territory).
But first,
a question arises: who the hell am I do
such a perhaps arrogant or overly ambitious thing as write and circulate a
proposed constitution?
I have two
answers to this question:
1) What did James Madison have that I
don’t have? Answer: slaves.
2) Nothing in the Cosmopolis proposal
is my idea, not one thing except for the synthesis, the tying these proposals
together into one proposal that is mutually reinforcing and sustaining.
Everything in Cosmopolis exists today somewhere or has been practiced somewhere
in the world at some point or has been proposed in a serious way by others. Indeed,
I have tried to be faithful to the Marxist tradition of developing theory and
practical proposals (“All power to the soviets”) based on the practice of
movements and struggles.
So, about
the city:
We need a
political form that is immediately realizable, that does not have to be
constructed from scratch in the face of a global market, and corporate,
financial and state repression. The city already exists, and people can
understand it as a sphere of political activity.
The city is
small enough to enable to assemblies of residents in neighborhoods or in small
towns to directly legislate and administer governmental power, and to delegate
that authority in a controllable (by the people directly) way. The direct
democracy of Occupy, Indignados and other movements can be a reality and
actually govern the cities they have occupied. Lacking such a perspective meant
that the movements had this as their implicit, latent project but that it was
not developed because the problem seemed to be at the national and global
levels. Indeed that is where the problem is, but the solution was always where
the movements found themselves.
It is not an accident that the movements became movements in and of cities – Occupy Oakland, Occupy Denver, etc, and that even those movements not naming themselves for cities as in Greece, Spain and Egypt nevertheless occupied plazas, square or piazzas in major cities. The city and township are where these movements can realize their actual meaning and potential.
The city is
indeed where all such non-state political projects that have been revolutionary
and directly democratic have taken place.
Even before
the city, the village is where common property and management by village
assembly have been practiced since ancient times. But Marx’s continual protest
that this form of communism was the material basis for the despotic state in
the ancient world and in modern non-capitalist countries should be taken seriously:
this is what happens when the regimes of common property in every locale are
not coordinated at a more universal level, the constituent or dual power
becoming constituted, the political sphere itself. The villages have until now
lacked the communications and transport infrastructure and the access to universally
produced wealth to enable them to openly challenge the state as the political
authority. With modern cell phones, the internet and other infrastructure this
is less of a problem, though this concern is why Cosmopolis stresses the need
for technology transfer from the global North to the South, and the need to
quickly build solar roads, high speed trains, light rail etc. linking areas.
As for the
cities, this has long been a privileged political area but now must become
universal together with non-urban municipalities (“townships” in the Cosmopolis
terminology, but I am not fixated on the terms) so that the city no longer
exploits the rural area. This latter goal is accomplished by the city and
township being defined as the political identity of a territory that enables
cities to be at least minimally self-sufficient in basic needs like water, food
and energy and some basic production, and for rural areas to include a large
enough population and enough resources to provide basic services like health
care, higher education, transport and access to wealth.
From the
first Sumerian cities which were governed by citizen assemblies (before the
first kings), to ancient Athens and Vaishali, to the Italian and Belgian city
republics of the middle ages and Renaissance, to the 1848 Revolutions which
were all in cities and set up city republics, to the Paris Commune to the 1877
Railroad Strike in the US when workers took over and ran cities, to the Soviets
of 1905 and 1917 – which we too easily forget were city governments of workers,
to the Seattle General Strike of 1919, to Barcelona in 1936, to the Kwangju
uprising of 1980 in South Korea, to Tiananmen Square, Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting, to
Occupy and the other movements of the past few years, from Thailand (the “Red
Shirts” movement) to Egypt to Greece, to
the autonomous Good Government Towns of the Zapatistas, the city has been a major,
perhaps the key site of revolution, direct democracy, and the possibilities of
another world.
The city
already has some degree of commitment on the part of its residents. It can hold
people’s loyalties and provide them a sense of belonging.
And it is
not the national state. Here it has other qualities that are to be preferred:
the city and even the township are cosmopolitan in ontology if not always in
practice – they do not pretend to the ethnic homogeneity of national states
with their origin myths. They do not require exclusion of ethnic minorities in
the way that nations do. They do not even really have borders, the walled
medieval cities notwithstanding. Cities have always been more diverse than
other geographic entities – the earliest Sumerian cities that we know of had
Semitic populations together with the Sumerians (whom we know almost nothing
about).
And, by
changing the scale of political authority and power to the city, we can, to use
an Italian term “de-dramatize” the issue of borders and immigration. If people
enter the US from Mexico there are only two options, you stay in Mexico or
enter the US. If they go from North Africa to Southern Europe the same logic
applies. It can seem an “invasion” even to those who don’t live near the border.
Cities are
many in the world. There are always more places to go. At the same time, no
commons regime or commoning practice can function without some minimal standard
to how many people are included at any one time, who has a voice in managing
the commons resources in question, and no direct democracy can function without
some basis for determining who has a vote or who is eligible to govern (even if
a very loose one such as ACT-UP’s old principle that you had to attend your
second meeting before you had a vote, for Padova2020 here where I live it is at
your third meeting). This was a lesson of Occupy in many places.
I have addressed these issues through the ideas of free movement to wherever one wants to go, the requirement (which comes from African and Native American village practices in many areas, and among some ancient Greek cities as well) that cities must maintain places of residence and resources for their
The 1%
number by the way is proportionally nearly 3 times the current number of people
emigrating to the United States annually.
Cities may
limit the number of new arrivals in any given year, but this does not have the
same impact as the US doing the same as there are always a lot of other cities to
go to, and one can always wait for next year if the city one wants to go to has
reached its quota of new arrivals for the year.
Just as
importantly as the universal freedom to move to anywhere on the Earth to
another township, and the easily overlooked freedom to opt out entirely from
this worldwide order, opting out persons or communities having some territory,
resources and limited but guaranteed income from the Universal money agency and
being able to trade with cities and townships, is the crucial regime of
citizenship.
People need
to be citizens of where they find themselves. I have posited 90 days as a
waiting period, one that demonstrates that one intends to remain a time in a
place, while at the same time being so brief as to make really universal
citizenship as a system. And here we have citizenship as a member of a
community that is self-governing, where one immediately becomes part of the governing
system, not dependent on representation or external authority to enforce your “rights”.
The cities
are part of Cosmopolis, indeed they together
constitute it. It comes into being when enough cities opt in by adopting direct
self-government, local money, and protection of new arrivals (as a precedent to
citizenship as they gain their collective sovereignty) in enough places to
withdraw national tax payments and begin the new system. They can’t be a part
without the universal aspects, like acceptance of universal money, of new
arrivals and their citizenship rights, and so are not strictly autonomous or
autarkic as in some of the federalist ideas of Murray Bookchin, many of whose
ideas I have borrowed openly here. Indeed no federation of cities against other
cities is permitted, so while the overall sovereignty structure is consistent
with anarchism, this is not an anarchist order in the sense that the realist
school of international relations see today in the order of national states.
So
Cosmopolis is not “localism” instead of globalism. Indeed it is both more
universal than global capitalism in scale and scope (and equality and
inclusiveness obviously), and more technologically advanced – it posits even
closer transport and communication integration between cities and townships,
allows all people to go wherever they want with their citizenship and governmental
authority mobile and their subsistence guaranteed both as members of a city and
as recipients of the universal money deposits globally.
Cities have
territory and self-defense forces only for internal order and protection and in
case of having a hostile neighbor, but other than the direct right of community
self-defense, no military action of any kind is ever possible or allowable
unless the Cosmopolis as a whole as exercised through the delegated Regions
(which always include 1/3 members from cities and towns not from that same region
geographically, hence from the Cosmopolitan whole) approves and decides there
is a common threat.
The main
disciplinary instrument therefore is expulsion from a city. This in itself does
not entail loss of citizenship, except for the period of exile, and in any case
people found guilty of violations remain free to go to another city or, with
the more likely option of returning to the city of their current residence, to
go to a rehabilitation center run as a township by those exiled there (as their
preference) and as citizens of that center for the time agreed on between the
city whose rules have been violated and the center.
Slavery,
trafficking, and related activities are treated more harshly, leading
essentially to expulsion from Cosmopolis itself (the only form of involuntary
opting out) due to their threat to the whole system of human freedom and
self-government and common management.
There is no
private property, nor any copyright and all scientific or other knowledge is
immediately available through the internet and its presumed successors. Indeed
hoarding of knowledge or technology is a practice that immediately potential
boycott procedures. There is, for the short term, money, because I at least
cannot imagine going from our almost total dependence on money (at least where
communal land is not common) to non-monetary communism in one fell swoop. Besides,
it is possible that Braudel and others are right and money is only an
instrument in any human community (as David Graeber shows, money has existed
for millennia before coinage, and most money today is likewise not coinage).
In any
case, if capitalism is the imposition of socially necessary labor time as a
universally applicable standard to enforce value production then that is not
possible here. Aside from the abolition of property and the completely communal
system of work organization, and the use of money to de-link completely work from
income and subsistence, the dual money system, in which there are only local
money which cannot be used outside a city or town and universal money usable
only for trade between cities and their component cooperatives, means that
there cannot be a single system of value
and average rate of profit.
While there
is complete freedom of association, there is no political or economic power in
the hands of any ethnic, tribal, religious, or professional group. They will
exist only for the use value they profess to exist for, scientific research
(funded universally for specific projects, but with income of scientists still
only that available to other citizens), religious exploration and practice,
cultural activity and so on.
All work is
cooperative and cooperatively managed, and everyone who wants to work will have
work, but no one will need to work to survive. But most people will want to do
something, whether it be design things, build things, help raise children, grow
food, clean streets or whatever, though with the recent advances in renewable
energy I foresee a high level of automation except this too lends itself to
artisanal and handicraft and artistic work, since anyone can do any kind of
work they like essentially.
I see this as
a classless society, but it may not be a status-free one. I think that is fine
and think that it has been a mistake of Marxists not to see the difference. Ironically, the Soviet Union may
have gotten this part right to an extent. Not the actual material rewards of
villas, privileged consumption for athletes, artists, and party members, but
rather that where monetary rewards were not necessarily available, people were
rewarded with prestige, the Lenin medal,
etc. I think that the prestige in Renaissance republics of winning the
competition to design the local cathedral or city hall door will return in each
city in its own way. And each will choose the way of life it wants within these
overall standards.
This
is a green alternative, a communist one,
a socialist one, a municipalist one, a universal approach, a local
community-based approach, a world of commons, a world of cities, a world open
to “immigrants” while abolishing immigration as such since the whole world is
open to us all, a world without private property, with enough for all yet one
that even some libertarians might prefer to the world of today.
I think an
interesting test would be: would the actual populations of Vatican City, Mecca,
Lhasa, Jerusalem and Salt Lake City prefer to remain as is under the tyrannies
of state, market, corporation, finance, or be self-governing and never worry
again about how to live and survive, free to come and go as they like but with the
proviso that each year up to 1% of their population may be anyone else who
wants to live there and who will also be a citizen of their city?
I would
like to see.
I look
forward to all your feedback.
Steven Colatrella
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