hex_m_hell

I'm in the middle of writing a zine (or maybe book) on revolutionary theory. But things are moving fast, and I want to get some core ideas out into the world. So listen up real quick, because what I'm going to say could help you win a revolution.

First, we're going to establish some terminology. The theory I'm working on is rooted in cybernetics. Cybernetics is the study of the control in systems. Systems are just groups of things that interact with each other. Basically everything we know about is some type of system. The solar system is a system of planets, a star, and a bunch of ice balls and space rocks that all interact gravitationally. A wave is a system of water particles interacting with each other, the air above, and possibly some surface below. A person riding a bicycle is a system of a bicycle and a rider, each of which is itself a system of gears and chains or muscle, bones, and neurons. Only the last system has what we might call “control” in that it regulates itself (the person's movements balance the bike, the bike also balances itself but only with some external help from the person).

The systems we're talking about here are governments and societies. To talk about these things, we need to define a couple more terms. This is where I'm going to deviate a bit and invent some of my own terminology (or rather, borrow via metaphor) in order to be able to more clearly explain some concepts. But first, let's introduce term drawn from cybernetics: viability.

In about 5-7 billion years the sun will expand, consume the inner planets, boil the oceans, and turn the Earth into a floating cinder. While waves around the antarctic may keep going essentially forever, most of the ones we're familiar with crash against the shore seconds after they form. These are not viable systems.

A viable system is one that attempts to reach a state of homeostasis (essentially, staying the same). Such a system will adapt to internal and external changes, in order to “steady” the system. A rider on a bicycle is a viable system in that the front wheel turns subtly towards the direction it's falling, thus the bicycle will subtly self-right. The rider will additionally compensate for by shifting weight to maintain balance. If a gust of wind, an external force, pushes the rider and bike from the side the system will respond by moving the wheel towards the fall and shifting weight slightly against the wind. If the rider wishes to change direction, an internal change, they will shift weight and perhaps turn the wheel. After the turn is complete, the system will adjust weight and wheel to right itself again.

Organisms are viable or they cease to exist. Business, social groups, and governments are also viable, or they cease to exist. In cybernetics, a system that can perpetuate itself for a given period of time is said to be viable. But viability is relative to one's environment.

A fish may be viable in the ocean, and inviable on land; a cat would be the opposite. A polar bear may be viable in the arctic but inviable in the jungle; a gecko would be the opposite. So the environment is absolutely critical to understanding viability. Viable systems adapt to their environment. Some, like beavers, maintain or even create their environment. Some organisms are so fit to their environment that they will die if it changes.

When settlers came to the place they ended up calling “the Americas,” they found a fertile land that was highly tuned to supporting (specifically human) life. They imagined it to be an untouched wilderness, a perfectly preserved nature. They failed to understand that the various environments were being carefully tended, plants picked and spread, fires set and managed, etc.

As the ice age receded across Europe, hazel and willow spread far faster than they should have without assistance. Like the people of the Americas, Europeans had also adapted environments around themselves. This didn't stop with the enclosure of the commons, and that will become more clear when we define the concept of an “environment” within this cybernetic framework. (This is where I go off and define my own terms. Don't worry, I'm not going to do it much. But this is important, so pay attention.)

An environment is a system that, while not strictly itself viable, defines what is viable within itself (primarily) through the interaction of the viable systems within it. Those systems, in turn, redefine what is required to remain viable. Every environment defines a “fitness function.” That is, in any given environment there exists a set of constraints. Any system that remains viable in the system must be able to adapt to those constraints.

Environments often develop feedback loops. So long as it requires less energy to maintain an environment than to adapt to a new one, there will be evolutionary pressure that drives adapted viable systems to stabilize that environment. Similarly, if it requires less energy to adapt an environment to a viable system than a viable system to an environment, then there will be evolutionary pressure to adapt the environment. These concepts will become critical later.

Different environments define different resource constraints. An equatorial desert is defined by lack of water, but not by lack of sun. If people build water catchments, such as swales or demilunes, the desert can green. Plants shade the sand, absorbing energy, cooling the area and increasing the opportunities for more rain. Oases can grow to forests, or even, perhaps, jungles. In jungles water is abundant, but sunlight is scarce. Plants that control sunlight for themselves and their collaborators then define the ecosystem for themselves.

Now we return to the enclosure of the commons. Socioeconomic systems are abstractions that both overlay and interact with the physical world. Governments exist to maintain these abstractions. But these abstractions are themselves environments, and the entities that maintain them also exist within them. Much like people tending the land, governments tend the systems that allow them to control resources. They maintain legitimacy, manage economic transactions, and so on.

The enclosure of the commons redefined the mechanisms of control available within the environment. This, then, necessitated a shift in the narratives around legitimacy.

Capitalism itself, as an environment, became something that needed to be collectively managed (by the elite class) to maintain their power (against the population). This environment has been managed, to a greater or lesser degree, with minimal centralized control. That is not to discount the power of centralized organizations like the IMF and World Bank, or state level organizations like the US Federal Reserve. Nor is it to discount policies such as those (ostensibly) barring monopolistic business practices. Rather, it is to say that elites can compete for power within the environment of capitalism while cooperating, consciously or not, to maintain the system of capitalism.

So capitalism can be thought of in much the same way as any natural environment, such as a desert or river, if highly abstracted and operating within the memetic rather than physical space.

Let's pause for a moment and address the other new term: memetic. The word “memetic” is referring to an information environment. Memes are any pieces of information, letters, words, the concept of how to read, a picture of a cat with the words “i can has cheezburger” written on it. Memes live in the mind. Capitalism is itself a meme. It lives only in the mind of people. Together we act-out capitalism, we manifest the memetic into the physical through the actions that memes inform.

Elites and their institutions maintain the meme of capitalism. Governments control it and enforce rules that perpetuate both elite control and the illusion of popular input. Macroeconomists maintain the apologetics. Police enforce the meme with violence.

At times this maintenance may even harm some elites. Tesla's stock responds to the stock market, even while he controlled many associated institutions. Elites often fight within this environment for control over it. That is the context of America's two party political system: two sets of elite interests with opposing beliefs about how best to manage this system of oppression.

Even in extremely authoritarian systems, there can still be fights for power within those systems. Those fights for power will often operate within the imaginary constraints that all controlling parties have agreed to adopt.

But it is not only elites and their agents maintaining the system. Let's return to an earlier line: “So long as it requires less energy to maintain an environment than to adapt to a new one, there will be evolutionary pressure that drives adapted viable systems to stabilize that environment.” We have all adapted to exist within this system, and so we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, adapted to it.

Unpredictable changes in the environment, even those that destabilize our oppressors, can also threaten us. In this way, we are also incentivized to maintain the environment, capitalism, this system of oppression that is used against us.

But how, specifically, does this system control us?

It's time to introduce the word “algedonic.” This is another word drawn from cybernetics and the science of control. I swear I didn't make it up. It originally comes from biological science, and it refers to pleasure and pain signals. When you burn yourself, your nerves send an algodonic signal (specifically algos, meaning “pain”) up your nerves to trigger an immediate response. After that you may continue to get a lesser algodonic signal that reminds you not to do that again.

All viable systems develop some sort of algodonic signals. Hunger, for example, is an algodonic signal. If they don't develop such signals, they don't stay alive very long, and they are thus not viable. Any viable system can thus be externally controlled, if a bit crudely, by inflicting such algedonic signals on it. A cattle prod will render a person compliant, if only for an instant.

The abstracted environment of capitalism standardizes alogdonic signals into a single fungible and quantifiable token: money. The fitness function of capitalism flows through money. The more money you have, the longer you, or your family line, or your business, or your church, or whatever, survives. The more money you have, the more influence you have in the system. These properties create side effects. Because the political system also exists within the economic system, the more money you have the more power you have over the political system.

From these simple rules, more complicated rules emerge. Elites change laws to protect themselves, creating a more and more complex set of instruments to further and further abstract the domination. It isn't a noble stealing your house because he can. It's the bank foreclosing on a loan because market conditions drove something, something equity blah, blah abstractions too complex to follow.

Let's summarize where we are now. Elites, without intentional coordination and often in direct conflict, maintain an environment (capitalism) together. They do this because it makes it simplifies their control of people and governments all over the world. Everyone, including the elites, agrees to operate by the set of rules (or, in many cases, is forced to operate by them). Elites abide by these rules because doing so allows them to control the rules without having to resort to a revolution to seize control.

Now we've returned to the ambiguous word we started with: revolution.

The word revolution is one of those words you think you know the definition of, until you actually start trying to define it. Then it turns out to be a very slippery fish.

• Mike Duncan

Popular historian Mike Duncan spent the better part of 9 years talking about revolutions in the popular podcast of that name. For the purposes of his podcast, he defined a “Revolution” as “a sudden, radical change, overthrowing the old regime and replacing it with a new one.”

From there he goes on to continue to pick apart the definition and point out how actually difficult it is. We're going to use the terminology we have borrowed and created to come up with a definition that aligns well, but not perfectly, with his definition. The value of this redefinition is that it's more clear and more precise. So let's get right back down to changing the meaning of words to make things more clear:

A “revolution” is any internally imposed and intentionally inflicted extralegal change in either the abstracted environment (such that dominant systems maintaining that environment can no longer maintain control) or seizure of control over the algedonic channels of an environment. It's internal, because an external change is a “foreign war” or “invasion.” It's intentional because the collapse of a government from its own incompetence is not a revolution, it's just a failed state. Revolution definitely requires intent.

A revolution must necessarily be extralegal. Systems may define for themselves mechanisms by which power passes from one group to another. A monarch being crowned as successor to their parent is not a revolution, it's just succession. In a system that calls itself a democracy, radically different groups may trade control. These groups may even radically change the algedonic channels of the environment (for example, by offering social services that aren't tied to employment). To be a revolution, it necessarily must violate the law.

A lot of revolutions change the environment then take control of it. That's what the Bolshevik revolution was. To some degree, that's also what the American Revolution was (a shift from colonial monarchy to capitalist oligarchy). Some older liberal revolutions claimed to be the former while actually being the latter. Simón Bolívar fought for the independence of Gran Colombia from the Spanish, but ultimately imposed a very similar political structure to the monarchy his revolutionary work rejected. The French Revolution similarly changed who controlled power, from absolute monarch to absolute dictator, even while attempting to change more.

Most revolutions either seize control of the algedonic channels of the environment or radically change the environment so that they can create new algedonic control systems. This is why revolutions tend to end with some variation of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

OK, but how is this different from a rebellion? A rebellion is a revolution that never actualizes removal of the dominant system. OK, but what about a civil war? A civil war is a revolution that seizes control in some territory but does not completely remove the dominant system. OK, but how is this definition different from a coup? It isn't. A coup is an elite revolution. For the purpose of this definition, we're not going to distinguish because it's not a useful differentiation. How is this different from incremental reform? Well, reformism is legal. (I could also say that revolutions actually tend to change things, but surely I consider myself above such cynical comments.)

But let's go back to the legality thing. Why must it be extralegal? What if a bunch of people gradually shifted the system somehow such that- Yeah, and then what happens? The law exists to protect the structure of the system. If the structure of the system changes enough, laws will be created to regulate it.

But there's a subtle catch here. Much of the work needed to lay the groundwork for revolution may well be legal. So the revolution itself will be deemed illegal, but the illegality of the revolution does not, by definition, matter to the revolutionaries themselves. They carry out the revolution expecting that they will either make the law irrelevant, or die trying.

Not only does this model reveal more useful strategies for radical change, it also sheds light on the dynamics of electoral politics and the current insurrection. It tells us more about what's happening, and about what we should do if we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past.

But let's take a moment to analyze the current situation through this lens by summarizing the relevant points of The Great Convergence and Its Discontents from The New Design Congress.

The article talks about the concept of “surplus elites.” There exists a limited amount of political power. Under capitalism, capital is a proxy for political power. But it is not literally political power. If a society produces more elites (those who control capital, or whatever other proxy for political power is relevant) than there exists political power within the system, elites react to this scarcity by modifying or overthrowing the system.

While anarchists point out that the system has always lacked legitimacy, liberals complain about the “illegality,” “criminality,” “corruption,” and “unconstitutionality” of the whole situation. Both of these perspectives can be correct at the same time. The “legitimacy” of the system is actually threatened by violating the rules of the system. Meanwhile, the rules are still essentially arbitrary and controlled by the people who we are told they bind.

The weakening of “civil society,” NGOs and Neoliberal governments, made this coup possible. But how can people who already control the government have a coup? Well, they're changing the underlying system by openly violating the law (the agreements between elites over how the system will be managed).

Then we are already in the middle of a revolution. The question is simply to see if it will complete or not. But a revolution that is incomplete is an incredibly vulnerable one. By weakening the legitimacy of the system it's trying to overtake, the revolution threatens its own legitimacy and makes room for alternative revolutions.

If we want to now lay the groundwork for a liberatory revolution, it is not enough to just fight against the people who are oppressing us. We must understand how those who control us use the system to do that, and we must understand how they maintain the system. We must focus on reducing the power of those algedonic channels and safeguarding against new ones.

We are quite fortunate to be faced with an opponent who, while also weakened by being in the middle of a revolution, does not actually understand how of this works. Nor do they care to figure it out. Rather they believe that by sizing the means of violence, they can leverage violence alone to control the population.

We must weaken that control, and all other forms of control, by changing the environment in which they are operating. This is what it means to build dual power. It is the process of changing the environment so that the environment itself becomes hostile to the survival of the power structure. Like digging swales or demilunes in the desert to fill aquifers, so plants can grow, changing the way resources flow in the environment changes the system. By tending the system for our uses, we can grow a different abstraction that serves everyone instead of a few.

More concretely, we must build systems to make our communities more resilient to disaster. We must also consider human made disasters, including war and occupation, within the scope of that mandate. By building these systems together, horizontally, we prefigure a world where it becomes harder to exercise centralized control. The existence of such systems within this environment then changes the environment, bringing us what we need to flourish and starving hierarchy until it withers.