In response to a question from Ed Cone in comments to a post of his about the AIG brouhaha, I offered a capsule summary of the type of economic and financial system I’d ideally like to see in place of existing arrangements:

The short answer is that I’d favor an economy in which democracy did not stop at the factory gate or office door, but is organized around a network of worker/community-governed (not state-controlled) enterprises. The closest living example I can point to is Mondragon. On a more head-in-the-clouds theoretical level, I’d describe myself as straddling mutualism and syndicalism.

I went on to concede the unlikelihood of any such alternative system emerging (beyond isolated small-scale island operating awkwardly within the roiling sea of post-late capitalism), and to express my willingness, “[i]n the here and now [...] to work within the realm of the possible to achieve reform, while also critiquing the limits of reform to help push it as far as it will go in what I hope is the right direction.”

While accurate as far as it goes, my comment failed to convey my fundamental pessimism about the prospects, not only for revolution, but also for moderately positive reform. In a contribution to The Nation’s ongoing forum on “Reimagining Socialism“, Mike Davis pretty much sums it up:

I realize that is not fashionable these days to praise the CPUSA in its sectarian heyday or to applaud highly confrontational tactics that provoke violent official responses. But if these are near-to-the-end times, when social change risks being “too late,” as our new president repeatedly emphasized in a brilliant campaign speech that quoted Martin Luther King Jr. from 1967, then we must be as forthright about the need for disorder (“raise less corn and more hell”) as were our populist and socialist ancestors.

From my point of view, this starts with the recognition that there are no realistic solutions to the current planetary crisis. None. A peaceful, just-in-time transition toward low-carbon, rationally regulated state capitalism is about as likely as a spontaneous connecting-the-dots of neighborhood anarchism across the world. Simply extrapolating from the present balance of forces, one most likely arrives at an equilibrium of triaged barbarism, founded on the extinction of the poorest part of humanity.

I believe that socialism/anarcho-communism–the rule of labor upon and for the earth–remains our only hope, but the necessary epistemological condition for serious strategic and programmatic debate on the left is a rising global temperature in the streets. Resistance alone will clear the conceptual space needed to synthesize the meaning of Rebecca Solnit’s small, stateless utopias with the huge, confusing, soiled but heroic heritage bequeathed by two centuries of working-class and anticolonial struggles against the empire of capital.