Hola Aloha, From the site https://broomstick.tymyrddin.dev/posts/
original (with pics & lay-out): https://broomstick.tymyrddin.dev/posts/capitalism-exit/ Building an exit from capitalism Neither the Big Bang nor the Slow Drizzle works. On the defensive, constructive, and offensive strategies that might actually shift the balance, the failure modes nobody likes to mention, and the international layer nobody has built yet. April 30, 2026 14min read Points made: - Stop the bleeding - Dual power, and how it falls apart - Capture the state at the right level - How capital reacts - Ranked levers - A loooong timeline - Not for free A boring, decades-long plan for getting out of capitalism without burning the village down. The two stories most often told about how to get past capitalism both fail in roughly the same way. The first is a Big Bang: revolutionary seizure of state power, redesign from above. The historical track record is grim. New rulers inherit the same coordination problems, the same resource constraints, and the same external threats, and tend to respond the way besieged regimes generally do, which involves rather more centralised violence than was originally promised. The second is a Slow Drizzle: keep reforming capitalism, year after year, until something better gradually emerges. Capital, however, adapts faster than regulation, and results tends to be that each reform is digested, monetised, and stripped for parts. A more realistic path appears to be a slow hybrid: build alternatives in the cracks of the existing system while also chipping away at capital’s veto over politics. Worth saying outright: this approach does not produce a clean exit. It produces a long coexistence, in which capitalism continues to dominate while a parallel system grows alongside it, occasionally absorbing it in patches and frequently being absorbed back. Success looks like shifting the balance, not winning the war. Anyone selling the war is selling something else. Three overlapping strategies tend to come up: defensive, constructive, and offensive. Each comes with a predictable counterstrike, and treating those counterstrikes as separate problems, to be worked out later, is one of the ways movements lost and lose. Stop the bleeding And notice who is doing the bleeding. Capitalism’s quiet weapon is the threat of destitution. Organising is hard when missing rent means losing the children’s school, so anything that pulls survival off the negotiating table is structurally important: universal basic services (healthcare, housing, water, electricity, public transport, internet), debt cancellation (student, medical, housing), strong rent controls, community land trusts, anti-monopoly enforcement. These are sometimes described as technocratic tweaks. They are not. They are direct hits on asset owners, and asset owners can be expected to behave like any other class facing direct hits on their interests. Rent controls trigger landlord lobbying, court challenges, deliberate disinvestment in maintenance, and a steady push for exemptions; without indexing and policing, they erode under inflation in roughly a decade. Universal basic services trigger capital-flight rhetoric, sovereign-debt downgrades, and renewed austerity pressure when the next crisis arrives. Debt cancellation triggers financial-sector panic and bond-market punishment of any government brave enough to attempt it; this is more or less what happened to Greece between 2010 and 2015, and the Greeks were only asking for restructuring. Anti-monopoly enforcement triggers jurisdiction-shopping, regulatory capture, and the well-funded production of friendly economists. This is not a list of reasons to be cautious. It is a list of things to plan for. Every defensive policy needs a defensive infrastructure for the policy itself: legal teams, indexing rules, mass organisations capable of mobilising when the courts come knocking, and journalists prepared to call disinvestment by its name. The defensive line is the front line, not the warm-up. Dual power, and how it falls apart “Dual power” is an old phrase for building institutions that prefigure the new system inside the old one. Worker cooperatives, community land trusts, platform cooperatives, mutual credit networks, municipal public banks. Capital accumulation appears to weaken in places where the profit motive cannot directly operate, though it routes around such spaces or reabsorbs them later unless actively blocked. Every parcel of land, firm, or credit network kept out of market logic is a square metre of liberated ground, which stays liberated only with maintenance. The standard examples still hold up. Mondragon, founded in 1956, now spans manufacturing, finance, retail, and education, and has weathered multiple recessions through internal solidarity and salary ratios. Community land trusts hold land collectively and lease it for housing or farming, removing it from speculation. The Bank of North Dakota and Germany’s Sparkassen channel public credit toward housing and infrastructure rather than toward whatever yields most that quarter. Solidarity economy networks in Brazil, Spain, and parts of Greece use mutual credit and time banks to bypass conventional finance. The story that gets told less often is how these things fall apart. Coordination costs in cooperative networks rise faster than membership: every new cooperative has to negotiate with every other one, governance meetings multiply, and the people who happen to be good at endless meetings tend to accumulate informal power that nobody voted for. Internal conflicts (over wages, hiring, expansion, who is doing the unpleasant jobs, what to do about the member who keeps shouting) eat up the political energy that was supposed to be deployed against capital. Successful cooperatives also face what might be called the absorption problem: as they scale, they need conventional finance, conventional suppliers, and conventional regulators, and each of those interfaces gradually pulls the cooperative back toward standard firm behaviour. There is also the older problem of internal capture. Democratic structures can rot from inside as readily as they are crushed from outside: cliques form, bureaucracies drift, “temporary” exceptions to procedural rules become permanent, and the founding membership gradually loses track of what the organisation was originally meant to be doing. The meeting-people problem mentioned above is the visible tip of this; the rest tends to happen quietly, in subcommittees and procedural drift that nobody quite remembers agreeing to. Constant maintenance, rather than original design, is what keeps cooperatives cooperative. The Israeli kibbutzim are a textbook absorption case. Founded as radically egalitarian collectives, most of them privatised in some form during the 1990s and 2000s under generational pressure and exposure to broader Israeli market reforms; roughly three quarters of kibbutzim are now classified as “renewed”, which is the polite term for partially demutualised. The UK’s Co-operative Bank is a financial-sector version of the same arc. Founded as the banking arm of a successful mutual federation, it grew, took on a large building society in 2009, ran into a multi-billion-pound capital hole in 2013, and ended up majority-owned by hedge funds. The Co-operative Group lost control of its own bank in roughly eighteen months. Yugoslavia’s experiment in self-managed socialism, while a different beast, demonstrated a third failure mode: even genuinely democratic firms compete with one another, and competition between cooperatives can reproduce most of the dynamics of competition between capitalist firms, including unemployment, inequality between regions, and asset-stripping during a downturn. These are not arguments against the project. They are the project’s actual difficulty curve. Networks that survive seem to share a few features: aggressive internal democracy that prevents the meeting-people from quietly running everything, hard rules against demutualisation written into founding charters, strong federations that share losses across members rather than letting weaker units fail one at a time, and parallel institutions (cooperative banks, cooperative schools, cooperative media) that reduce the need to interface with hostile mainstream ones. The cooperatives that get absorbed tend to be the ones that grew without those defences in place. Capture the state at the right level The state is terrain, not enemy or saviour. Older left politics often treated it as a thing to seize whole; a more productive approach appears to start small, taking cities and regions where capital is less mobile, direct democracy is feasible, and a failed experiment does not collapse the entire movement. Red Vienna, 1919 to 1934, is a classic. The Social Democrats ran the city, taxed luxury aggressively, and built tens of thousands of units of dignified public housing, free clinics, schools, and cultural institutions, all while the rest of Austria moved toward fascism. The lesson is double-edged: municipal socialism can work, and it tends to be crushed when the surrounding state turns hostile. Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi has been doing something similar in miniature, in a state that is not exactly thrilled about it. Barcelona en Comú won Barcelona’s city government in 2015 and held it through 2023; the period showed both the possibilities (participatory budgeting, housing-rights enforcement, restrictions on tourist rentals, a municipal energy company) and the limits (without their own bank, the city remained at the mercy of private finance for anything ambitious, and lost office to a more conventional party once the original wave’s energy dissipated). The honest problem with municipalism is that the level is too small. Capital moves between cities at the speed of a wire transfer; municipalities move at the speed of council votes. Currencies, debt markets, and supply chains are organised globally; an autonomous city can decarbonise its bus fleet but cannot defy the bond market, source its own semiconductors, or print its own money. Hostile national governments can preempt municipal law, withhold transfers, deploy police, and (Madrid against Catalonia in 2017 is a recent example) ignore the entire framework when it suits them. Municipalism can hold ground. It probably cannot, by itself, win. This makes the international layer the hardest part of the project, and the part that currently has the least working infrastructure. Rebel cities would need to federate quickly, building shared finance, joint procurement, mutual defence pacts against trade-treaty arbitration, and at minimum a clearinghouse for legal precedents and policy tools. Networks like Fearless Cities and the older Eurocities gesture at this. Fearless Cities held a few summits between 2017 and 2021 and then noticeably lost momentum; Eurocities is essentially a lobbying group inside EU institutions. Neither comes close to the coordination capacity that would actually be required, which is something more like a customs union plus a development bank plus a legal-defence pact, run by cities rather than states. This is a hole in the strategy, and there is currently no organisation in any obvious position to fill it at the speed and scale required. Naming the absence is more useful than describing the federation as merely difficult; difficult things sometimes get done, but only after someone has noticed they need doing. How capital reacts The pressure scales with success, and the framing changes with it: below a certain threshold, a project is a policy disagreement to be debated; above it, a project is a threat to be neutralised, and institutional toolkits shift accordingly. A handful of harmless cooperatives are tolerated as a quirk. A federation of cooperatives that takes serious market share starts to attract regulatory attention, hostile takeovers, and selectively enforced laws. A city government that touches finance directly attracts capital flight and rating-agency attention; a national one attracts the IMF, the bond markets, and, in the harder cases, possibly even the CIA and its allies. The overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973 is a textbook case, but the list runs through Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1965, Brazil 1964, and continues, with diminishing literal coups and increasing financial ones, into the present. Defensive capacity therefore needs to scale alongside a project itself. Legal defence networks, with constitutional and human-rights expertise. Local food, energy, and water systems that make economic blockade less effective. Mass organisations capable of strikes, boycotts, and street protest that raise the cost of overt repression. Transnational solidarity dense enough that crushing one node attracts pressure from many others. The Zapatistas have survived three decades of low-intensity siege essentially through these methods: low visibility, high cohesion, and dense outside support. They are also, it bears mentioning, still poor, still surrounded, and still under threat. Survival is not victory. It is the precondition for a longer game. Ranked levers Not every individual action carries the same weight. A list that pretends otherwise tends to slide into lifestyle politics, the kind of advice that suggests one might knit one’s way out of global capital. Roughly ranked by structural impact: The heaviest lever an ordinary person has access to is workplace ownership. Converting an existing firm into a cooperative, or organising a workplace toward eventual conversion, removes a unit of capitalism from the board and replaces it with a democratic one. Trade union membership and organising are the entry-level versions of the same lever, and arguably the precondition for the conversion-level version. The infrastructure exists. Co-operatives UK and the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives provide legal frameworks, model bylaws, and conversion finance. This lever is hard to pull because it requires sustained collective action under conditions designed to prevent it, which is also why it matters when pulled. Finance is the next tier. Where deposits sit determines what gets built. Moving accounts to a credit union or cooperative bank redirects credit toward parts of the economy not optimised for shareholder returns. At the political level, supporting public-banking proposals is the same lever scaled up. Credit allocation is one of capitalism’s deepest control mechanisms; shifting it shifts everything downstream. Land is the third tier, mostly accessible through politics. Supporting community land trusts, public housing, and rent controls keeps land from being a purely speculative asset. Buying into a land trust where one exists counts; voting for candidates who will build them counts more. After that comes buying clubs, tool libraries, skill-sharing, time banks. These do real work, mostly social. They build the trust networks and habits of mutual reliance that everything else needs to rest on. They are not a substitute for confronting capital; they are the tissue that makes confrontation survivable. Treating them as the main event is one of the older mistakes in left politics. Most political life consists of arguing about the bottom of this list while the top remains untouched. Reversing the ratio is most of the practical work. A loooong timeline Nobody reading this is likely to see a fully post-capitalist nation-state in their lifetime. What might be visible, on a sober projection, is something more modest. Denser municipalist networks across a few dozen cities by the 2030s. Regional formations, perhaps Catalonia, Scotland, the Pacific Northwest, parts of Kerala, testing more radical departures by the 2040s, under the pressure of climate and financial crises that look very likely to arrive. Federations with internal trade rules based on need rather than growth by the 2050s and 2060s. Not utopia, but recognisable as something else. This is slower than revolution and faster than waiting for capitalism to collapse on its own, which, on present evidence, it will not; it will simply get crueller. Not for free Worth being clear about what this competes against. The cooperative-municipalist trajectory is one possible future. The other live trajectories are darker, and some appear to be winning at the moment. Authoritarian capitalism is already the dominant trajectory in much of the world: the rules of capital accumulation kept intact, with democracy gradually downgraded to ceremonial status, dissent criminalised, and the racial or national enemy of the year wheeled out whenever distraction is needed. Several large governments are currently testing this configuration in real time, and it appears to be a stable equilibrium for some decades. Ecological triage is the other plausible direction: a wealthy core hardens its borders while the global poor absorb the consequences of climate breakdown. This is also already happening; the immigration politics of most rich democracies are early drafts of it, and the rhetoric is moving steadily in the wrong direction. Capitalism collapsing on its own into something better is not on the menu. Systems that lose their capacity for reproduction tend to be replaced by whichever movement happens to be best organised at the moment of failure, and at the moment of failure the best-organised movements may well be the ones with simpler stories, more uniformed marchers, and a clearer list of people to blame. Worth being explicit about what each trajectory offers a comfortable citizen of a wealthy country, since this is what the choice looks like from the inside. Authoritarian capitalism offers stability in exchange for democracy: the trains run, the shops stay stocked, the wrong sort of person stops appearing on television, and political decisions stop being your problem. Ecological triage offers continued comfort in exchange for the exclusion of most of the world from it: the air conditioning keeps working, the borders harden, and the bodies pile up somewhere that does not appear in the evening news. Cooperative-municipalism offers participation, which is the same thing as more meetings, more responsibility, and more decisions that used to be handled by someone else. Most people, given the choice, would rather not. This is a real obstacle, not the conspiracies. The cooperative trajectory is therefore not inevitable, not deserved, and not somebody else’s problem. It is one of three or four directions humans might travel, and several of the others are presently better resourced. Doing nothing is not a neutral act in this contest. It is, in effect, a vote for whichever trajectory currently has the most institutional momentum, and at the moment that is not the cooperative one. The system one might want, the one that does not destroy people because of who they happen to be, is not the kind of thing that gets handed down from above. It tends to be built from below, slowly, by people who have stopped waiting for permission, and who understand that the alternative is not stasis but slow drift toward worse outcomes. Fragments are already in place. Whether they federate fast enough to matter is the open question, and it is being answered right now, by everyone, including those who are pretending not to answer. "It is only the People who liberate themselves" -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: https://www.nettime.org # contact: [email protected]
