Conclusion

“What more am I to do?” That is where I left off in Critique & Praxis.

The question today is more urgent than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic confirmed everything we know about the ills of society, its inequalities and failures. It confirmed the racial hierarchy and caste system in this country. It affirmed everything we suspected about precarity and the lack of universal health care, about who is truly vulnerable in our society, about the hidden interests of our leaders. We knew all that. The pandemic just confirmed it—as the Great Recession of 2008 had years before.

And it confirmed that we must focus in a renewed way on the goal of social transformation—of revolutionary change. The task now, as I see it, is to single-mindedly and tenaciously, like a laser, keep our eyes on the prize: revolutionizing our unequal and unjust society and creating a just society.

My goal now, more explicitly than ever, is to identify, imagine, or reimagine the revolution: what must it look like today, and how will it succeed in bringing about a more just and equal society? Everything I do, everything I write, every action I take must now pursue the mission of revolutionizing our society.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater reaffirmed this for me.³³² The resoluteness of his writing, the certainty of his ideas, the clarity of his vision, Du Bois leaves us with no doubt about our circumstances (circa 1919) and what we should do, perhaps even today:

If the attitude of the European and American worlds is in the future going to be based essentially upon the same policies as in the past, then there is but one thing for the trained man of darker blood to do and that is definitely and as openly as possible to organize his world for war against Europe.³³³

Yes, war against Europe—and not just Europe, but “Europe” as standing in for practices of exploitation, racism, colonialism, and all the other forms of oppression associated with our governing political economic regime of tournament dirigisme maintained by the police state.

Du Bois put much of his faith in education. Speaking of persons of color first, Du Bois wrote (and these are ominous words prefiguring our current carceral state): “We bury genius; we send it to jail; we ridicule and mock it, while we send mediocrity and idiocy to college, gilded and crowned.”³³⁴ He militated for education for all, not just whites or the wealthy. “All children are the children of all and not of individuals and families and races,” he insisted. “The whole generation must be trained and guided and out of it as out of a huge reservoir must be lifted all genius, talent, and intelligence to serve all the world.”³³⁵

Yes, education must be a priority—critical education that is. But much more is needed now. It is time for a revolution in how we govern ourselves and others.

The only way forward is a genuine transformation that replaces our existing extractive punitive regime with coöperative, mutualist, solidaristic, and non-profit enterprises. The legal structure that enables the corporate form—what Katharina Pistor accurately calls the “code of capital”—has to be repealed and replaced with a new economic framework that circulates the wealth generated from production and consumption. By replacing the logic of capital extraction—the extractive logic as Saskia Sassen calls it—with an ethos of equitable distribution, we can also prepare to address the climate crisis after the pandemic is over.³³⁶

It is not enough to increase progressive wealth taxes on the billionaires and invest more in public hospitals and public schools, as Piketty recently suggested.³³⁷ That will not fundamentally change the Faustian logic and temptations. Instead, and urgently, it is time to replace our system of tournament dirigisme with a new cöoperationism.

This pandemic and economic crash must not prevent us from working together to place ourselves in a better position to deal with the other crisis—climate change—still looming on the horizon. On the contrary, these times call for a legal, political, and economic revolution to ring in a new epoch of coöperationism. This will demand political will. It will not come from our political leaders, so beholden now to corporate contributions. It will have to come from us all united.

In the end, capitalism is a misnomer, and communism a non-starter. Only coöperationism will achieve a just society.

“Capitalist” economies, it was widely believed, were governed by the economic laws of capital: both the strongest proponents of capitalism (the free market economists of the Chicago School) and its staunchest opponents (Marxists and anarchists) held that capital has inherent traits that produce good (or bad) outcomes—that capital, in effect, has a force of its own. This reflected the materialism of Marx: capitalist modes of production necessarily cause increased exploitation and decreased profitability that autonomously destroy capitalism. It was also reflected in the magical thinking of the Chicago School and its precursors going back to Mandeville and Smith: the private vices and greedy pursuit of capital autonomously causes (through the invisible hand) the greatest public virtue.

But capital does not exist as an autonomous thing. It is a creature of the human laws of corporations. It can be privileged or disfavored. There are no independent laws of capital, and even the greedy taste that humans have developed for capital returns are not immutable laws of nature. The “capitalist” crises of accumulation that plague Western post-industrial societies are not an artifact of capital, but rather of tournament dirigisme.

“Communism” is equally misleading and no more promising. The valiant idea of living together in common may possibly work at times for a small commune, but it does not scale up to the level of a large economy. The problem is principally one of scaling. It too produces a form of dirigisme.

The state and these forms of dirigisme—hand in hand with the police state—have taken center stage for too long now. They are, however, merely a historical phase in human history. As Foucault demonstrated in Security, Territory, Population, the concept of the state was born at a certain period (with the theories of raison d’État) and has dominated our conception of governance over the past three or so centuries.³³⁸ But before that, there may have been monarchies, or even empires—and after that, there will be coöperation.

It is time to end our various experiments in statism and dirigisme and to embrace a new form of coöperationism. It is time to be guided by the principles of solidarity.