Warlords, Inc.

by Noah Raford

  As argued in the last section, above, the problem is not just political feasibility narrowly conceived (winning elections, getting legislation passed, and prevailing in litigation, all in the face of deep-pocket opposition). The required level of societal and cultural reconstruction is radically beyond the system capacities (particularly political/governmental, but also epistemological) of the world’s governing entities as they actually exist. Given the existing political economies and cultures of the world—and their organizational instantiation—the broad, effective, lasting mobilization of the political and organizational will, creativity, leadership, discipline necessary to carry through a project of this magnitude, complexity, and inherent difficulty is simply unimaginable, even absent the determined opposition of well-endowed obstructionists. This is a super wicked problem that existing authorities are not going to solve.46

  An Alternative Modernity?

  The climate-changed and multiple-crisis-ridden world that is coming spells the breakdown of modernity as we have known it. What will follow? Other contributors to this book have noted the power that “deviant actors” can rapidly amass during and after crises. But the kinds of deviant actors they are referring to have two great advantages over the kind of progressive “deviant” political agents that we are hoping to see rally. First, warlord entrepreneurs and their ilk are on the path of least resistance—they go with the grain of the dominant materialism rather than against it. They encourage and profit from greedy, shortsighted consumerism. In a perverse paraphrase of the old song by the Police, in a world that’s running down, they make the best (for themselves) of what’s still around.

  Second, these entrepreneurs seek to take advantage of systemic failures in order to further narrow agendas. They have no interest in contributing to repair, regeneration, and improvement of larger systems, at least not beyond the trade and finance networks they utilize. They prefer that larger systems remain weak, incapable of effectively monitoring or confronting the entrepreneurs’ operations, and amenable to covert manipulation through bribery and intimidation. Thus, in crisis environments, warlord entrepreneurs have distinct operational advantages over actors with broader agendas and ambitions, both existing authorities committed to stabilization of existing systems, and radicals and humanitarians who seek system transformation in the name of a just and viable future for their grandchildren and humanity at large. Warlord entrepreneurs can focus their attention, their muscle, their human capital, and their resources much more narrowly and be more forceful and persistent in their targeted involvements. Unlike humanitarians of all stripes, warlords do not need to inspire idealistic commitment from far-flung cadres and mass bases in order to leverage limited material resources in the mounting of broad campaigns that neither return any direct pecuniary profit to the central leadership nor motivate the cadre with the prospect of quick enrichment via capture of spoils. Of course, in the climate-changed world that is coming, ultimately, only those truly ready to live by the principle “après moi, le déluge” will be able to maintain such advantageous freedom of maneuver.

  It is true, as the editor of this volume has said, that particularly successful warlord entrepreneurs may “become large and invested enough to seek to stabilize their position and consolidate their gains. In this condition, they shift from entrepreneur/exploitation mode to service provider/maintenance mode, in which they become subject to implicit and explicit agreements with their customers/subjects/constituents for continued support. Thus over time, they begin to assume the role of the state itself.”47 This is still happening—and will continue to happen—on a localized level, but comprehensive extension over larger territories will become increasingly rare. In the climate-changed and multiple-crisis-ridden world that is coming, larger projects will become difficult or impossible without idealistically inspired, committed cadres and mass bases. It will be increasingly difficult to make the shift from local dominance to larger system-consolidation (requiring, among other accomplishments, the integration/subordination of all the other warlord entrepreneurs in the territory), except by committing to and sacrificing more immediate interests to some new social democratic vision—or some quasi-fascist vision. In short, transcending Puntland without becoming Pyongyang will require becoming a lot more like Portland (at its “best”), and a lot less like Houston.

  Avoiding both the Puntland and Pyongyang scenarios requires developing an alternative political economy that can survive and cope in the face of the new world that is coming.48 While large-scale governmental institutions will be important on certain crucial dimensions in any Green Social Democratic version of the climate-changed world of our future, in most ways, that world—whatever version eventuates—will necessarily be much more decentralized than the current world. What would such a political economy look like, and how might we get there from where we are now? What resources exist that might make possible the building of Green Social Democracy under such difficult conditions? While it is not true that we already have—even in the lab—everything we need in the way of clean/green technology, and all that is lacking is the will to fund full development and deployment, it is true that around the planet there are many people, groups, and communities that know and practice (at least in bits and pieces) something like the techniques, methodologies, and policies needed to step back from high-carbon materialism.49 The state of Kerala in India, with a population of over thirty million, has been (in some respects) a striking large-scale example.50 There are also many lessons, models, and toolkits to be picked up from communities and organizations around the world.51 And cross-fertilization between all this and advanced clean/green technology has taken off. What we do not have is an example of a national society adopting such practices anywhere near comprehensively—or even trying to move decisively in that direction. This is particularly true of the largest societies. As things stand, the voracious, high-ecological-footprint urban and industrial sectors of the largest societies will drag the rest of the world down into oblivion with them, no matter how green the rest of the world becomes.52

  For national societies to move decisively toward institutionalizing appropriate practices and technologies, existing institutions must be reconfigured so as to enable, coordinate, and manage appropriate investments, and both institutional personnel and the population at large must buy into the program with some dedication.53 This will require a profound switching of gears, an intellectual and political reorientation that, in turn, demands a retooling of the entire stock of human capital of the social sciences, the professions, organizational management, and public administration.54

  So is there some way to gather the lessons, technological innovations, stores of knowledge, toolkits, and green practices that are accumulating around the world and to synthesize them into a set of models that majorities everywhere might be persuaded to choose among, adopt, and enact? Note that the result must include the legitimation and administration of lawful coercion—up to and including the use of paramilitary force, if necessary—against ostrich-like status-quo dead-enders and self-serving deviant actors. As we have laid out above, existing environmental movements aren’t going to get that job done, given their reluctance to face up to the magnitude of the challenge—and given the power of elite opposition, the recalcitrance of majorities in thrall to materialistic modernity, and the tactical advantages of warlord entrepreneurs. What is needed then is a larger narrative with the potential to legitimize radical departure from the status quo to wider audiences, including renunciation of aspirations to affluence and the moral ostracism of those who insist on indulgence in material luxury. Neither radical environmentalism nor centrist ecological-modernization policy discourse is providing the larger narrative we need to challenge and replace the orthodoxy of neoliberal modernization theory and “the American way of life.”

  The twentieth century’s leading sources of broad, transformative vision, the Marxist and socialist traditions, are largely unhelpful in this regard, given that they expected to build on the
material abundance and technological wizardry of advanced capitalism. In most mainstream versions of socialism, capitalist consumerism was cast not as ecologically unsustainable, but rather as the penultimate form of economic modernity, one revolution short of the end game. In the finalized form, the entire population was to enjoy a version of the affluence formerly limited to the wealthy, as well as “higher” values. Even those who saw the early years of the “transition to socialism” as occurring in the context of Spartan Third World revolution assumed that the revolution would eventually fulfill itself in a socialism of mass abundance.55 That a life of higher values might be constructed in the permanent—not temporary—absence of mass affluence was not contemplated in these traditions, at least not in their twentieth-century versions.

  We propose looking to a different historical tradition, namely, the petty bourgeois political culture of capitalism’s early and middle industrial eras in North America and Europe. This tradition did not call for the overthrow of capitalism but rather argued for a more modest and cautious (in a sense, more “conservative”), more egalitarian and democratic, more decentralized “producerist” capitalism.56 A twenty-first-century producerist capitalism would recast this politically democratic tradition, but in the context of vigorously and comprehensively Green economics. This kind of robust, community-centric self-empowerment could perhaps be a viable alternative to going down with the ship of high-modernist capitalism as it breaks up or to taking to the lifeboats captained by warlord entrepreneurs.

  Many countries can look back to their own early-modern experiences for something analogous to producerist republicanism. In Russia, they might look back to Bukharin and the New Economic Program years; in China, it would be the World War II cooperatives and the “Yenan Way” born out of that experience; for India, it would involve looking to how the Kerala of the last fifty years has built on Gandhi’s movement.57 But the history of conflicts within the development of capitalism in the United States is particularly instructive in this regard.

  From the American revolution through the 1930s, the United States has a rich history of democratic radicalism and enlightened populism among skilled craftsmen, artisans, family farmers, business people, professionals, and intellectuals, centered on the lower middle class, but reaching up into the higher middle classes and down into the rural and urban working classes. These traditions have often been denigrated by both Marxists and liberals as entirely unenlightened—anti-industrial and antimodernist, prone to anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-intellectualism. But such judgments, while by no means entirely wrong, crudely homogenize a highly variegated history and set of movements.58

  What these movements and traditions, at their best, had in common was along the following lines: the demand that self-managed, self-enhancing work and political citizenship be valorized and protected from the depredations of federalist aristocracy, the slave power, the robber barons, the trusts, Wall Street, and corporate capitalism. Most of the leaders and cadres of most of these movements and organizations, including many of the agrarian Populists, were neither wholly modernist nor wholly antimodernist. They were not enemies of commerce and industry per se. Many were professionals and teachers, tinkering “mechanics,” agricultural and sociopolitical innovators, interested in science; they participated vigorously and rationally in the public spheres and civil societies of their days—indeed, they were among the most important authors of the greatly expanded public spheres of their days. By the later nineteenth century, a substantial proportion of the leaders and cadres of these movements were women, pioneers of female civic activism, who went on to be key leaders and cadres of the elaborate, Progressive civil society of the early twentieth century.

  The social protection these movements sought included public construction and ownership of major infrastructure and government regulation of the corporate capital, finance, and the factory system. They promoted widespread small production, linked together in a “cooperative commonwealth” through large-scale producer co-ops and vigorous political organization. Social and political identities were understood to be rooted in such cooperative arrangements of production and community self-management, rather than in privatized, individualistic practices of consumption.

  This political tradition provides an Archimedean point from which to critique the pop-modernization-theory view of economic viability and societal success that has become hegemonic over the past seventy-five years. Recapturing the energies and hopes of this lost political assemblage allows us to see more clearly the assumptions and limitations of the orthodox, growth-centered vision of modernity that has led us to the brink of global ecological catastrophe. From the Civil War to World War II, neither economic theory nor popular political folklore insisted that modernity necessarily came as an integrated package, a package whose central components include the unlimited pursuit of industrial revolution, incarnated in gigantic, ravenous factories; the transformation of the population into “personnel” within complex, hierarchical organizations; and the elaboration and institutionalization of a culture of material consumerism and high-tech entertainment. The hegemonic culture that sees these developments as central to modernity is not the product of the natural progress of efficiency, science, and rationality; a particular pattern of contingent political victories and defeats has played a major role. This pattern need not be accepted as irreversible; path dependency need not be enshrined as unbreakable.59

  We now need to revive aspects of the popular political culture of petty bourgeois civic republicanism that valued community, solidarity, moral economy, meaningful work, self-management, and democratic citizenship over economistic individualism, material affluence, and private consumerism. Note that we are not saying that any of the earlier incarnations of producer republicanism could have been fully victorious in its time, nor are we saying that any could be or should be reincarnated whole now. Recovery must include critically-minded updating and reformulation in the light of the lessons of the past seventy-five years. In particular, we need to spike that heritage with a major dose of cosmopolitanism regarding race, gender, and sexuality,60 and we must give up the vision of an eventual metamorphosis into a socialism of abundance. Such a project is surely not without intellectual rewards, and, as a leading historian of American Progressivism and petty bourgeois radicalism has said:

  Nor are such utopias unattainable.… Charles Sabel, Michael Piore, and Jonathan Zeitlin have created something of a school of political economy that has demonstrated the economic viability of small-scale production within flourishing, democratic economic networks. Historically, Sabel and Zeitlin reconstruct and rehabilitate a craft-based alternative to mass production, an alternative that had impressively strong roots in various cities and regions throughout the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Flexibility and constant innovation in specialized production formed the foundation for a labor process that revolved around skilled workers … with owners and workers often attaining a solidarity difficult for us to imagine as part of business relations. And despite the many defeats this small-scale alternative met at the hands of both capitalist and social democratic advocates of a mass-production economy, it did not disappear but merely went underground, showing a remarkable resurgence since the 1970s. Especially strong in western Europe, “flexible specialization,” or “small firm networks,” provide a contemporary living model of what Michael Albert has aptly characterized as “Capitalism against Capitalism.”61

  The ray of hope that we hold out is that our imagined Green Social Democracy, underpinned and legitimized by producerist republicanism, will ground itself in an acceptance of the limits imposed by the fecundity of local environments and networks, rather than a Promethean ethos of constant overcoming of those limits. As such, it would encourage localized sourcing, localized production, and localized consumption. It would focus on the conversion of public infrastructure to low-carbon, clean energy as quickly as possible. It would provide universal access to such infrastructure, while making private
use of centrally generated power and water quite expensive above a very modest minimum allotment. Tax and regulatory policies would focus on environmental impact and resource management. Governments, educational systems, and civil society would prioritize training, equipping, and enabling the population to be low-carbon “producers” of useful goods and services (especially the “human services”), and informed, environmentally conscious, responsible citizens within local communities, organizations, and enterprises. In other words, it would be something like the comprehensive elaboration of an intensely green version of the “social economy” model that has worked on the local level in Quebec and other places, and the “transition town” model that has taken off in England.62

  Given the scale of necessary systemic retrofits—and the onslaught of disasters that must be prepared for, engaged, and recovered from—there will be a huge amount of work in energy and manufacturing conversion, infrastructure adaptation, ecological reclamation, emergency response, human services, and community development, and so on. This will be a full-employment economy, for the most part locally focused. Moreover, such a political economy—one emphasizing high levels of environmentally conscious human and social capital, largely situated in small production units (owned privately or through co-ops or local government) and community-based human services, supported and coordinated (but not centrally planned or directed) by larger, environmentally informed public institutions—would enable cutting GHG emissions and render societies more resilient and adaptive in the face of climate change. It is plausible that people whose lives are rich in social capital, educational opportunity, interesting work, and citizenship rights and responsibilities will be more amenable to being weaned off materialistic addictions—or they wouldn’t develop strong addictions in the first place—particularly if a supportive political culture has been brought into being in advance and is rising toward hegemony.