Anarchism & the Commons

Conversation with Carne Ross - Part 1

This is the first part of a conversation with Carne Ross, a former senior British diplomat who resigned from the foreign office due to the UK government’s decision to help the U.S. invade Iraq in 2003. After that, he became interested in Rojava, an anarchist enclave in Northern Syria, and he made a movie about it, The Accidental Anarchist.

Part 2 is about Rojava and the Commons.

---

Below is a video of our conversation, followed by a summary, and then the complete transcript.

Summary / Main points covered

• Carne’s upcoming book There We Can Be Human Again explains anarchism. It’s about people governing themselves—a viable alternative to capitalism or state control.

• Anarchism is the opposite of chaos or violence (a common misunderstanding). It’s about true democracy, looking after each other without domination or overarching authority. It also involves personal liberation and self-expression.

• There are different versions, but although ‘libertarianism’ used to be synonymous with anarchism, since WW2, it’s taken a right turn, and is not oriented towards commons. Libertarians believe that corporations became huge because of efficiency, but anarchists can see that corporations are big because of the assistance they get from the state, and without it would not be able to compete with small businesses.

• Society is too complex for top-down governance. The commons, which involves people coming together locally to govern themselves, can do a better job.

• Elinor Ostrom debunked the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ idea—that resources will be depleted if not privately owned. She won a Nobel Prize for showing how resources can be shared and preserved via commons, if people share governance of them.

• Capitalism began with the enclosure of the commons, putting resources into very few hands.

• Now it’s maintained with the help of the state. Author Kevin Carson shows how the state helps corporations, which are far less efficient than small businesses. Banks make huge profits, but if they overreach and fail, the state uses our money to bail them out. Jaguar Land Rover were bailed out in the UK after a cyberattack, but small businesses are allowed to fail.

• Large-scale bureaucracy stifles innovation, but corporations nevertheless have subsidies, patents and legislation that protects their monopolies.

• The state could be commons-friendly, but has been co-opted by corporations and the super-wealthy, who hate the commons for reducing their profits. But if we persevere, we can build a commons movement that neither corporations nor the state can stop.

• All sectors of the economy can be brought into the commons. There are new commons tools and ideas that can help build a successful movement.

• Anarchism and communism are completely different - opposites in fact, and often enemies.

• Anarchism was strong and popular at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. But now it’s opposed by both capitalism and communism - both top-down systems.

• The left favour the state, the right corporations. But now that the biosphere is being destroyed, it’s time to think about a real alternative that’s neither left nor right.

• In 1917, there were in fact two Russian Revolutions - one in February that removed the Tsar, and one in October when the Bolsheviks took power. Between those two revolutions, workers took control of the factories and peasants took control of agricultural land. Also, there was a huge anarchist movement in Ukraine, led by Nestor Makhno.

• It was a real opportunity for Russia to move in an anarchist direction rather than towards a centralised, authoritarian system. But in October, the Bolsheviks took power through violence, and the factories and farmland were centralised under state control.

• If workers and peasants could have held onto the factories and farms, there could have been a decentralised, anarchist movement that could have provided a real challenge for capitalism globally.

• During the Internationals at the end of the 19th century, there was intense debate about the way forward. Bakunin warned Marx that seizing state power on behalf of workers would end in authoritarianism. Seizing power requires violent men, and when violent men seize power they never voluntarily give it up. But all these discussions just involved middle-class men, not workers or women.

• Soviets were actually citizens’ assemblies, but they were never allowed to have power, which was centralised in the state. ‘Soviet Union’ was a misnomer.

• We live in a society where power over others is celebrated (whether capitalist or communist), rather than sharing power.

• The Bolsheviks almost collapsed several times, and if they hadn’t seized power in Oct 1917, the 20th century could have been very different. Ukraine might have been anarchist immediately, Russia could have supported the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and after WW2, Eastern Europe and even possibly China could have moved in the same direction.

• Some academics have said similar things (e.g. Orlando Figes, Noam Chomsky).

• Most revolutions (e.g. Russian, French) have been imposed from above, and cemented centralised power. An anarchist revolution grows from the bottom up, with consent, not imposed.

• Anarchism / commons is a more plausible model of change for the 21st century, now that we have the internet, and a range of new commons tools and ideas.

• Commons is a buzzword now, although most people still see the state as the only alternative to corporate power. However, state power is shrinking as the power of money (plutocracy) grows. We need to spread awareness of commons as a viable alternative to both corporations and state, keeping wealth in communities, rather than allowing it to be extracted and then trying to tax it back.

Transcript

Dave: I’m talking with Carne Ross, a former senior British diplomat who resigned from the foreign office due to the UK government’s decision to help The US invade Iraq in 2003. After that, he became interested in Rojava in Northern Syria, an anarchist enclave, and he made a movie about it, The Accidental Anarchist.

Hello, Carne.

Carne: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me.

Dave: So a group of us are trying to build the commons in Stroud and Liverpool, and you recently spoke at our festival of commoning in Stroud. So I’d I’d like to talk to you about anarchism and about Rojava and about how the commons relates to those things, starting with anarchism. But first, you’ve got a new book coming out. Can you tell me about that?

Carne: Sure. Its provisional title is There We Can Be Human Again, which is actually a kind of call for anarchism because that’s what I believe anarchism provides for, permits. The book is coming out early next year with a publisher called Perspectiva. And it’s basically a kind of personal story of how I came to anarchism, how I abandoned the state and the system and came to a radically different philosophy. But also through that story, an attempt to explain the relevance of the philosophy and of these ideas for our contemporary situation.

Dave: So I see commons as anarchism in practice. But I don’t know whether it’s a good idea to say that because I think most people still think of anarchism as violence and chaos. And, you know, the sex pistols didn’t help with ‘Get pissed, destroy’. But for me, it’s just shorthand for decentralisation of power. If you’re talking to people about anarchism and they think you’re talking about chaos and violence, what do you say to them?

Carne: Well, I, you know, I say there’s actually a second meaning of anarchism or an alternative meaning of anarchism—which if you look in a dictionary, it provides—you know, which is is the absolute polar opposite of the way it’s commonly understood as disorder or chaos or violence. And that is people governing themselves, in equality of power between them, and negotiating their own affairs without hierarchy, without domination. And that’s a completely different way of looking at society, and the economy, and our politics, and I would argue offers the possibility of genuine social peace and harmony in a way that our current system does not, because our current system divides us against each other.

Dave: My favourite definition of anarchism is democracy taken seriously. And also it’s the belief, as David Graeber said, that people are basically good, but the power corrupts.

Carne: Yeah.

Dave: And I’m happy to call myself an anarchist and I come across lots of great people who call themselves anarchists these days too.

Carne: Yeah. Well, good. I’m glad you did, Dave. Dave, I encourage you to do so.

Dave: Is the word tainted or could and should we resurrect it?

Carne: To be honest, I’ve lived with the word for, you know, twenty years now, since, you know, I first started looking into it after I left the foreign office, and I don’t even think about the alternative meaning. And, you know, when I talk to my publisher about titles and, you know, talk about blogs and stuff like that, yes, people say to me, oh, well it’s associated with violence and you can’t use that word, why don’t you just call it self-government or something like that. And I say, well look, it is what it is. Anarchism is a set of ideas, a philosophy that has been around for a long time. And, you know, it would be basically absurd for me to pretend that it’s called something different.

And also a lot of people have sacrificed a great deal for that idea, you know, in some cases their lives. And I want to honour that. I want to honour their sacrifice and try to, you know, live the tradition that they began to explore.

Dave: Yeah. No. I agree. I’m just wondering whether strategically it’s a good idea to use it if we want to build commons. I mean, a lot of people, they want local ownership of resources and participatory democracy, but they don’t call themselves anarchists.

And I wonder if we should just use the word commons and avoid the word anarchism or should we just go for it?

Carne: I think it doesn’t matter much. I think if you don’t wanna use anarchism, that’s completely fine. You know, one of the issues is that there are many different versions of anarchism. There’s a kind of purely, kind of individualist libertarian anarchism, which to be honest isn’t really anarchism, it’s libertarianism, you know, if everybody can do whatever they want, everybody for themselves, without any authority, without government. That is not my kind of anarchism.

Anarchism that I believe in is a much more communal affair where, you know, the welfare of somebody else is directly our concern because unless they have welfare and enjoy a good life, we won’t. That we are defined by other people. And that the best way to produce that society is a society without hierarchy or domination, that is self-governing, without a kind of overweening authority telling us what to do. So it’s a very different version of anarchism. But at the end of the day, people can call it what they want.

I do think however, you know, particularly as we consider there’s a growing movement for participatory democracy. —I saw yesterday that Jeremy Corbyn had said that there’d be juries who would decide his new party’s policies, and that would then go out for a vote to the wider membership. So, you know, it’s beginning to get some traction in the mainstream, but, you know, what he’s talking about is definitely not anarchism. It’s a different way of deciding the policies of a top-down party that wants to be in control of the state. You know, which is not anarchism at all.

You know, anarchism is a very, very thoroughgoing philosophy of how we re-engineer society through its political decision making, but also its economic distribution and how it runs the economy. And I do think commoning to an extent captures all of it. It’s not the whole story though, because I have come to think that anarchism is also a kind of philosophy of personal liberation that goes beyond the practical matters of how you organise society, or how you take decisions together, or who owns what. Those are the kind of mechanics of it. But there is a different—well, not different—but from that, there is an almost spiritual dimension about self-determination, about true self-expression of what we are.

I don’t think—I mean you can tell me Dave, you know better than me—but, you know, commoning touches on that. But I think anarchism does allow for that broader view of what it is. To me, it’s much more than a political philosophy. It’s a whole way of thinking about life.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s funny you mentioned libertarianism. If you read about anarchism in the nineteenth century, libertarianism was synonymous with anarchism. It was interchangeable.

It was the same thing. It was only after World War Two that libertarianism took a rightward swing, and they’re more interested in sort of individualism and nuclear family and, again, just as opposed to the state, but not so interested in commons.

Carne: No. I mean, in particular, American libertarianism. I mean, there’s a strong thread of libertarianism in The US, you know, that goes back a long way, but it’s now manifested in—there’s a political party called the American Libertarian Party. There are politicians who call themselves libertarians, and you know, there’s a movement, you know, for instance in Maine, Vermont, of libertarians trying to organise themselves, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. But you know, focusing on things like the government shouldn’t tell us what to do, they shouldn’t tell us what vaccines to have, they should allow us to have guns, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s a very different view of freedom, of what self-determination actually means.

Dave: Yeah. And they don’t have so much of a problem with corporations. They see corporations as being big because they’re efficient. Whereas anarchists tend to see corporations as being big because the state props them up.

Carne: Yeah. I mean, that that blends into the idea of anarcho-capitalism.

Dave: Which is an oxymoron.

Carne: Yeah. It’s of course a complete contradiction in terms, but that is the philosophy that some people in Silicon Valley seem to hold and some of them call it anarcho-capitalism. The idea that the corporation is the primary unit of society in delivering welfare and meaning, and that you should remove all constraints on that corporation and allow it to do what corporations do, which is maximise profit and expand.

Dave: Yeah. Like, you’re a high profile person who’s come out as an anarchist. That’s very rare. So, even if you don’t use the word, people can look you up and discover that you’re an anarchist.

Carne: The cat is well and truly out of the bag in in my case, yeah.

Dave: It really is, isn’t it? Have you had any negative reactions or consequences because of that?

Carne: Well, the consequences, you know, for one thing, I’m not gonna visit the US anytime soon, because my political views are so present on the internet. I mean, it’s not just anarchism, it’s also criticism of Trump, of the genocide in Gaza, et cetera. And that’s a great pity, because my family is American. My wife is American.

A lot of my family and law and friends live in America. I lived in the US myself for seventeen years, so it’s a great great shame. Though many others are suffering far worse from Trump. So that’s perhaps one direct consequence. I think one of the interesting things is when I first started talking about these ideas twenty years ago, people would just laugh.

You know, oh, anarchism. And I was almost embarrassed to talk about it as well, and I would sometimes kind of giggle as well, but now I don’t. That’s partly because I take the ideas more seriously, but also I think, you know, the collapse of the current order, the disaster of the current order is becoming very very clear to people, And that means they’re looking for answers. And I think when I started writing about this stuff in, you know, 2004, 2005, that was not the case. A lot of people still believed in this kind of third way between capitalism and socialism, that sort of Blair Clinton Obama view of how you could run things. And I think that vision of society has in many people’s eyes been discredited. And then the question is, what else? You know, what else can we have? You know, if we’re not to have the Trumps and the Farages, what are the alternatives?

And what I find very very shocking is that people have no idea of what the alternatives could be. You do, people in Stroud do, I do, but very few others. And, you know, that’s my purpose in life now, to try to put these ideas out there and say, look, I think this is worth considering. You know, it’s not a panacea, people aren’t perfect, anarchism is not perfect, but it is a very, to me, a very compelling vision of what we could be.

It’s not tinkering with policy, it’s not tinkering, you know, with proportional representation or, you know, participatory assemblies to decide our climate policy. It’s a much more thorough philosophy of change, but to me a very exciting and liberating one.

Dave: Indy Johar also spoke at the Stroud Festival, and I know that you both say that society is too complex for centralised top-down institutions to govern it because the overall state of the system is unknowable. We can never be sure of the consequences of one action. We need bottom up governance. I think commons can provide that. And unlike capitalism, it has no growth imperative. It has no extraction, no wealth concentration, so it can be sustainable, community building and democratic. Do you see a connection between anarchism and commons?

Carne: Absolutely. And indeed, analysis of commonly owned, commonly governed resources, if we can call them that, though that implies exploitation, so I don’t particularly like that word, but anyway, the idea of commonly shared, owned, governed resources is something I talk about in my books quite a lot. You know, there’s a number of ways of looking at this. One one is, you know, the work of Elinor Ostrom, who very convincingly showed—she won the Nobel Prize for this work—very convincingly showed that shared management of common resources is the best way to preserve them. And thus, completely turns on its head the very commonly held notion of the tragedy of the commons, that commonly owned property or land will be degraded, because everybody will be incentivised to exploit it as fast as possible.

And in fact, she shows that’s not true. That when the people who get benefit from those resources are given a role in governing those resources, they will cooperate and preserve that resource. They will continue to exploit it, to fish it, to farm it, to gather wood from it. But, you know, shared governance is the best way. And that also overturns the notion, our very deeply held notions of property.

That, you know, we can have a piece of land, but it’s got to belong to us. Property rights are essential for progress, for growth. You know, and this goes back very far in the history of capitalism to the ideas of John Locke and others, but even preceding that, the idea that basically land is better off privately owned, it will be better used if it’s privately owned. And the commons turns that idea on its head. You know, capitalism began with the end of the commons and the beginning of private property.

Basically, the appropriation of what was owned by all of us to be owned by a very few people, and we are living with the consequences of that centuries later.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Garrett Hardin wasn’t talking about commons, he was talking about a free for all.

Carne: And he was wrong. You know, read his stuff. It’s not actually very convincing. No. Whereas Elinor Ostrom’s stuff is empirically based, it’s a meta survey of hundreds of academic papers, you know, it is profoundly compelling.

I mean, everybody ought to know her name.

Dave: Yeah. And the Nobel Prize Committee agreed with you.

Carne: Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry she’s not around because she’s like a heroine of mine.

Dave: Me too. Me too. So, yeah, I know that you took some time out after you resigned from the foreign office and did a lot of reading. I wonder if you’ve come across Kevin Carson. He’s my go to anarchist author.

Carne: I have not. Okay. Now will. I will look him up.

Dave: He shows how corporations would struggle against small businesses without the state. You know, the state taxes small businesses, but not corporations. It gives contracts to corporations. It passes legislation that small businesses struggle with, but corporations don’t.

They bail corporations out if they fail, and politicians often sit on the boards of corporations.

Carne: So they get the profit and we get the costs. Exactly. and that is not the free market I was taught about in economics, at university. And that means that, you know, big companies like banks, but also corporations. We’ve just seen Jaguar Land Rover bailed out by the government because they had a cyber attack.

And the government thinks Jaguar Land Rover is so important that it’s worth billions of pounds of state subsidy to rescue it. Now that’s not gonna happen to your local farmer. Or the guy running the local fish and chip shop. He will just go bust. So there you can see, you know, a vast discrepancy in the way big corporations and small companies are treated.

Dave: Yeah. And, yeah, if we took away that state prop for corporations, small local businesses can really flourish, I think.

Carne: Yeah. Totally. I mean, in all sorts of ways, they are better. They’re more responsive, they’re more dynamic, they can change more quickly, they are more innovative. You know, you read any management study, or you talk to – I used to sit in the same office as an innovation consultancy, which was kind of at the bleeding edge of capitalism – and they would say that it’s very difficult for big corporations to be innovative, because bureaucracy stifles creativity and imagination.

And this is one of the other insights of anarchism, that any big organisation, it could be anything, it could be an NGO or a bank or a car manufacturer, inevitably becomes about itself. It seeks its own perpetuation. That is its primary objective. And that is not necessarily about providing the best products.

So a big company might become rent seeking, which means basically it’s looking for a source of income where there is no competition, and that can be from the government, through subsidy, or through some legislation that preserves, you know, protects their market. Rent seeking is a very common behavior of large companies. That’s got bloody nothing to do with innovation and providing us with better TVs or better cars, which is, you know, one of the great myths of capitalism.

The only place where I think that kind of protection and support actually is helpful is pharmaceuticals. My views differ in the case of pharmaceuticals, because you do need government intervention to correct market failure, to develop, you know, to pay companies to develop drugs that have such a small market, because there’s very few people who suffer from that disease, that, you know, they’re not entitled to subsidy, but it is worthwhile in terms of social value to give them a subsidy to do that. But it has to be very carefully handled, otherwise you create monopolies, and that certainly happened to a degree in pharmaceuticals. You’ve got the whole business of patenting, which is, you know, problematic, for a whole host of reasons we don’t need to go into now.

Dave: Can we get a commons-friendly state? or is the state more likely to try and close us down?

Carne: That’s a really good question. Yes, of course you can have a commons-friendly state. You can have laws that encourage the commons and don’t protect the monopoly of private property or private business. Yes, you can tilt the playing field in their favour, absolutely. However, the state is co-opted by the people with most power, which includes corporations, and they hate the commons.

Not to put too fine a word on it, they hate it, because it means taking away what gives them profit, and putting it in common ownership. And they will react to that with great fury. You know, they will organise against it, they will use every power that they have to manipulate government to protect their advantage. You can see this going on in New York City right now, where this, you know, avowedly socialist candidate is running for mayor of New York City. And very openly, various billionaires have got together and said, we need to organise to stop this man.

You know, because he threatens what they’ve got, which is enormous concentrated wealth. And so it’s very open that battle sometimes. But if there were a movement towards the commons, which I would love to see of, you know, people taking over their own enterprises, retaking back the commons from the people who stole it from us in the first place, there would undoubtedly be a government, a violent government reaction. But, you know, there are ways of breaking through that as well. Just to look on the more hopeful side, I remember going to a village in Southern Spain, which actually featured in the film, where the villagers repeatedly occupied the land of a local aristocrat, who didn’t use the land, who just basically sat on it, and it was not exploited.

And they repeatedly organised marches onto the land. And over and over again, the police stopped them and forced them back. And they just kept doing it until the police gave up. And they now own that land in common, and it is cooperatively farmed. This place is called Marinaleda in Andalucia.

Dave: Yeah. I think most people think of land when they think of commons. And, yeah, certainly that’s an important part of it, but we’re looking to build a housing commons in Stroud. We’re looking to bring housing into common ownership. And also energy and the water infrastructure and care and all sectors of the economy, really.

Carne: Yeah. You know, where traditionally, the alternative to private ownership has been seen as state ownership. That the state should run water, should run housing, you know, public utilities, et cetera et cetera. And I think, you know, both private ownership of those utilities and public ownership have proven to be inadequate in different ways. But with the same outcome of inadequate service. And also no sense of agency over what these people do.

I mean, water is a classic example, you know. Do any of us feel we have any control over these people who charge us outrageous bills and pollute our rivers? So commons ownership needs to be promoted as a real alternative, a better alternative to both of those models. Unfortunately, most people think the alternative to private ownership is the state, is public ownership. And some people confuse anarchism with communism, which – they are fundamentally different things.

Dave: Very, very different. Often enemies.

Carne: Yeah, well they have been, you know, at war with each other in, you know, civil war Spain, they were.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We’re we’re working with sort of top engineers and specialists in water, and housing specialists, and people working in the care sector. And we’re bringing these new commons tools and ideas, and we’re talking about ways that we could, you know, build the commons in all sectors of the economy.

So. Coming back to anarchism. So anarchism was a powerful force at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, but it’s not now. And I think people see it as a bit pie in the sky now. But it’s not, is it?

Carne: No. It’s not at all. And it’s worth referring back to, you know, its origins in the late nineteenth century, because it was very popular as an answer to the ravages of, you know, Victorian era capitalism. The cruelty of it, the exploitation of children, the brutality of it, how workers were treated, whether in factories or the mines or wherever. Anarchism was proposed as an answer to that, but it was brutally beaten back by the capitalists, who didn’t want the people to run things for themselves.

And later, the communists opposed that notion too. Stalin didn’t want people to run things for themselves. The communist believed in a powerful top-down state, you know, which became a repressive state in the case of communism, rather than, you know, a much more, you know, a much freer vision where people organise government, self-govern, you know, and commonly own things, rather than the state owning things. And I think given the history that we’ve seen of the failure of state based communism, but also now the failure of capitalism in preserving, you know, the very means of our lives, you know, the planet is being destroyed, it is time to consider another alternative.

Dave: Yeah. I mean, it’s really annoying when you’re talking to pro capitalist people, and you’re critical of capitalism, and they automatically assume you’re a communist. And it’s like, I like communism about as much as you do.

Carne: Absolutely. You know, and it’s a great pity that on the left there isn’t more understanding of these ideas. You know, going back to Jeremy Corbyn, who I was talking about earlier, you know, his view of the vector of change and the thing that should deliver equality in a better society is the state. You know, the state should provide for that through taxes and redistribution and whatnot. And I think that model has failed.

And I don’t think it will succeed again. You know? And if he tries it, he will be stopped.

Dave: Yeah. I mean, I think anarchism could have been the real challenge for capitalism in the twentieth century, not communism. I’d like to know what you think. So, in the Russian revolution in 1917, there were actually two revolutions. There was one in February, which removed the czar, and there was another in October where the Bolsheviks took power.

But between those two revolutions, not many people know this, that the workers took over the factories and the peasants took over the land. And plus, there was a huge anarchist movement in the Ukraine with Nestor Makhno. But when the Bolsheviks took power in October, they started to centralise everything again until they’d taken the factories off the workers and the land off the peasants, and the state controlled everything. And they crushed the anarchist movement in the Ukraine.

But the Bolsheviks only just won, didn’t they? So things could have been very, very different.

Carne: And they won through violence.

Dave: Yeah.

Carne: Very tellingly. You know, they annihilated their enemies very quickly. That was one of their first priorities.

Dave: Yeah.

Carne: And they used violence to take power, which tells its own story about its legitimacy. But also interestingly, I mean, there’s a parallel, or perhaps even the inspiration to the episode you talk about, is the intellectual history of anarchism and communism, where, you know, from the very beginning of communism, the first international, there was debate about what kind of communism it should be. Should it be state based communism, Or state based socialism, as they called it then? Or should it be anarchist, libertarian socialism? They called it libertarian socialism.

Dave: Yeah, it was anarchist.

Carne: And, you know, people like Kropotkin. And, you know, unfortunately Marx was on the side of state based communism. And, you know, for all sorts of complicated reasons, they won the argument. And the communist party became an advocate for state-based change.

And just talking about it, I was wondering to what extent actually there’s a kind of patriarchal and classist element to it. You know, these were all men deciding…

Dave: Yeah.

Carne: …which was the better model. These were middle class men deciding. There was very little working class involvement in these debates. And I wonder to what extent they saw the state as a way of preserving their own power and influence over others rather than a genuine vehicle for common ownership, which it clearly wasn’t, you know, from the very beginning.

Dave: Although Marx did say that he wanted the state to wither away, and it was Lenin and Stalin that had nothing to do with that. They said they wanted a very, very strong state, and so sort of blaming Marx for what Lenin and Stalin did was a bit like, I’ve heard it, it’s a bit like blaming Jesus for the Spanish inquisition.

Carne: Well, except that people did point this out to him at the time.

Dave: Bakunin, especially.

Carne: Bakunin, in particular, exactly. Bakunin said to him, your theory of change is going to lead to state domination, and therefore, I won’t support it. So, he can’t have been naive about that. People warned him that precisely this would happen, and there it did.

Dave: Yeah. But back to the Bolsheviks, they only won because they got a large section of sailors and soldiers on board. And I think the soldiers and sailors thought they were defending the Soviets, which were the sort of citizens’ assemblies. If they’d have known that the Bolsheviks weren’t going to give power to the Soviets, they wouldn’t have supported the Bolsheviks, and they would have lost. And then you had the Kronstadt rebellion at the end of the civil war in 1921, soldiers and sailors rose up against the Bolsheviks with the slogan, Soviets without Bolsheviks.

Carne: Yeah. The Kronstadt rebellion is a great inspiration. Everybody should know about it. You know, it was a genuine people’s revolution.

Dave: Yeah. And a Soviet, that’s another tainted word, I think, but it was actually just a citizen’s assembly and the Soviet Union was supposed to be a network of nested citizens’ assemblies from neighbourhoods up to the national level. But the Bolsheviks destroyed that idea.

Carne: It was appropriated. The idea was exploited and appropriated by people who wanted power for themselves. You know, and that is of course one of the dangers of anarchism, is that it, you know, it will be manipulated, by people who want power. And there’s always a minority who want that, particularly in our society where we’ve been told that the only way to be truly free is to have power over others, you know, to clean our bathrooms, polish our yachts, and all the rest of it. That’s the only way to actually have the best kind of life. Which is not true by the way, but anyway, you know, we live in a society where power relations are extolled, are celebrated, rather than denigrated, which is what they should be. And, you know, it’s no surprise that Marxism was hijacked by those kind of people who want power. I mean, you look at the history of people like Stalin or the people around him, it was absolutely grotesque, monstrous, monstrous.

Dave: Yeah.

Carne: You know. And his life and his violence from the very beginning had bugger all to do with empowering people. You know, he was basically a gangster.

Dave: Yeah. But if they’d lost, if the Bolsheviks had lost, which they almost did several times, they almost collapsed completely several times, Ukraine would probably have been an anarchist stateless enclave. And then in the nineteen-thirties, maybe Russia would have supported the anarchists in the Spanish civil war rather than attack them.

And then after World War Two, maybe Eastern Europe would have gone more in an anarchist direction, and who knows? Even possibly China might have gone in that direction. And I thought yeah. I’ve recently found that there are academics, Orlando Figes, and even Noam Chomsky had said similar things.

So it could have been a very different century.

Carne: Totally agreed. I mean, there were a number of turning points where communism and the left took the wrong turning, but there was an alternative turning open to them. I think, you know, thinking about all of those examples, part of the problem is that our, and indeed the collective, even global understanding of revolution is that it should be top down, that it should be led by a kind of vanguard movement often of heroic self-appointed men, rather than something that grows from the bottom up. And that is definitely the way the anarchist revolution should happen, is that it grows from a common consciousness and awareness of this possibility and people taking over self-government for themselves. And that it spreads, that it’s not something that is violently imposed on others, which is, you know, often from the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution, that’s our archetype of what revolution requires.

And actually anarchism, you know, if it is imposed in that way, is not anarchism. You know, it always has to be by consent. By informed consent, by people choosing, you know, that this is a better way for them to live. And taking power themselves over their own affairs, their workplace, their neighbourhood themselves. And that also produces a very, a much more plausible model of change for today.

You know, people think the current system is absolutely immutable, it’s absurd to think we we can change it, et cetera et cetera. To the extent that they don’t even dare imagine an alternative. And actually that model of change of people taking power in almost like a microcosmic way, is actually very plausible. It’s almost like a micro politics. You know, that you take power in your own realm.

And that makes sense too, because that realm is where we actually live. We don’t live in these great structures of the state or institutions. We actually live in our surroundings with other people, in our workplace, in our house, in our neighbourhood, with our children, in their schools. And if we take power in those places, then, you know, we are beginning the kind of common effort of changing the whole of society as those experiments and projects begin to spread.

Dave: Yeah. I mean, the world didn’t go that way in the twentieth century, but maybe we can make it happen in the twenty-first with commons as a vehicle. And so, the Russian workers and the peasants and the anarchists in Ukraine, they really struggled to coordinate at a larger scale. But we have new tools now to help the commons to grow, hopefully exponentially.

And we have the internet, and we didn’t have all that in the twentieth century. And commons really is a buzzword now, don’t you think? And people have less faith that governments can solve our problems, and in fact they cause most of them.

Carne: Well, I’m not so sure Dave, I’m afraid.

Dave: You’re not so optimistic.

Carne: I’m not so sure that the ideas are that widespread. I think a lot of people still feel the only alternative to capitalism is a state-based, government top down, legislation-based approach, as offered by the left of the Labour Party, rather than a much more thoroughgoing social change of their economic and political and indeed social relations. I don’t think the awareness of that possibility is very widespread, unfortunately.

And that’s why I’m trying to do what I do of spreading the awareness of that idea. Because we do need an alternative.

Dave: Yeah. But attempts at decentralised, non hierarchical, truly democratic organisation, they keep coming back throughout history, don’t they? They’re not gonna stop it, I think.

Carne: Yeah. and indeed, arguably, you know, they are the dominant form of social organisation in history. That actually self-organisation and self-government is a far more common model of how we humans have run their affairs than, you know, the very rigid authority-based model of the state. That that is a very recent phenomenon, and arguably a very temporary one. That it will be replaced—arguably it is already being replaced by something else—, and that something else right now is the kind of power of economic actors, of corporations, you know, who use various political devices to reinforce their power.

So arguably, the state is actually withering away, if you like. But the power of the state to change things is eroding. You look at, the impossible straitjacket that any government is in when it attempts to raise taxes or offer redistribution, you know, even the tiny debate about wealth tax here in Britain. The impediment to it is the thought that if we have a wealth tax, all the rich people will leave Britain. And that that is bad for all of us.

Dave: Yeah, let them go.

Carne: And, yeah, and you know, that is an argument that seems to be stopping them from imposing any kind of wealth tax. And that’s true of any country, of course. So globally, there can be no wealth tax. Unless you all have a wealth tax, unless there’s a universal wealth tax in every country, including Monaco and Dubai.

Which of course is rather unlikely.

Dave: I like to call commons predistribution rather than redistribution, so we don’t allow the wealth to be extracted from communities in the first place.

Carne: That’s absolutely right. The origins of wealth should be shared. And indeed, the trouble with tax is it’s basically coercive, which anarchists oppose. You know, I don’t believe the state should be taking things from people according to what the state thinks is best. You know, I think we should consent to that decision, and we don’t.

We have no opportunity to consent to it. And so, you know, I believe that the generation of wealth should be shared through cooperative enterprises, through the commons, through common ownership. Rather than the consequence of private ownership, which is wealth inequality, being late in the process addressed by redistribution.