Collapse, Competition, and Dual Power

Speculative fiction has, again and again, imagined worlds where Fascism was not defeated, where Hitler did not lose. But these worlds were always impossible. The nature of authoritarianism leads to it’s own collapse. As climate change increases the probability of natural disasters, hierarchal organizations will be less and less able to grapple with the consequences.

As the Syrian Civil War showed us, if regimes will fail to adapt then counter-power can replace them. Assad’s government was incapable of adapting to the drought and subsequent events that lead to the civil unrest that marked the beginning of the Syrian Revolution. When the state failed to ensure the supply of bread, alternative institutions stepped in. Both liberatory (Rojava) and oppressive forces (ISIS) were able to seize power. Assad’s government, though it took more than a decade, ultimately succumbed to the limitations of its own authoritarianism.

As climate change continues to increase the likelihood of natural disaster, thereby increasing the complexity of the environment, authoritarianism becomes less and less viable. Meanwhile, as instability drives fear governments are able to move further towards authoritarianism. Authoritarianism, in and of itself, erodes and ultimately destroys the state. The decay begins with pro-social elements (environmental protection, financial support, healthcare, disaster preparedness) in order to preserve the mechanisms of violence at all costs. But even the mechanisms of violence ultimately collapse.

Within the context of the VSM, Neoliberalism (and the fascism that inevitably follows) can be thought of as the state removing it’s operational units. That is, it’s destroying the value production on which the entire system is built. This may conjure a right libertarian fantasy where governments compete for tax dollars in a capitalist marketplace, but such an absurdity is wrapped around a kernel of truth. While money is one manifestation of power, wrapped in capitalist mythology to hide it’s authoritarian function, the underlying choice to align or not align with a power structure (allegiance) is real.

A state that fails to provide services that people want (or expect) may struggle to collect taxes from its population. While the US can print money because the US dollar is a global reserve currency, even that position is based on an underlying “legitimacy” and perceived stability. As the population rejects the legitimacy of a government that, say, viably rejects it’s constitution and dismantles social safety nets, that government will struggle and may very well collapse.

As mentioned earlier, the VSM is a recursive model. A government can be either a viable or inviable entity in and of itself, and can also be the metasystem of, or have metasystemic functions within, a larger viable or inviable entity (a nation). The failure of the metasystem of a nation can bring the collapse of operational units that rely on systemic stability. Within national systems of state/capital, regulation and taxation are metasystemic functions. One core function of the capitalist state is to create and manage markets (the housing market, the labor market, the intellectual property market, the carbon credit market, etc). Within the capitalist state, markets can be modeled as operational units with regulatory agencies acting as the policy engine of the metasystem.

Improper or lack of regulation can lead to the collapse of these markets. (We will ignore, in this text, conversations about the feasibility of government regulation as a concept and simply pretend that the concept is possible.) Taxation (such as tariffs) and fiscal policy can act as regulations within these markets.

For example, regulations, tariffs, and taxes on tea and other goods in the lead up to the American Revolution weakened these markets and opened up a black market for those goods. This black market developed as a dual power, coexisting with the regulated colonial market. It’s no coincidence that several of the “founding fathers” were smugglers or had connections to smugglers. Nor was it a coincidence that attacks on smugglers turned people against The Crown.

The logistic infrastructure of The Revolution was the logistic infrastructure of the people, as The Crown attacked that infrastructure, those attacks actually bolstered The Revolution. One can frame this another way. The metasystem of The Crown failed to understand what colonists wanted. It directed its operational units to offer a service that wasn’t wanted by the colonizers. The failure of this metasystem made it impossible for the operational units to extract money and maintain legitimacy. Meanwhile, the oppositional metasystem correctly identified the needs of the colonizers and the operational units of that metasystem provided that value. Therefore the opposition, by providing services, extracted money and built legitimacy.

Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare can be analyzed in a similar way. Guerilla warfare centers the Revolutionary Program. Guerilla warfare, as a strategy, is not overthrowing the state in order to institute a revolutionary program. Rather it is using attacks as a means to immediately institution the revolutionary program in liberated areas. Liberated areas then support guerilla forces in maintaining and expanding the revolutionary program. The metasystem of the revolutionary program identifies the needs of the people and aligns operational units to fulfill those needs. A guerilla force as an operational unit, for example, may expropriate land and give that land to the workers. In doing so, the counter-power exchanges actions (attacking plantation owners, police, military, etc) for legitimacy and material support. Guerilla warfare is a revolutionary program with an insurrectionary operational unit. It is not an insurrectionary system that happens to be supported by a revolutionary operation to support it.

The strategy described by Guevara was to carry out this program in the country around a city, then to attack the logistics of the city in order to cause the collapse of the dominant authority within the city. That is, grow counter-power around a city by competing for legitimacy within the rural space. When established, leverage the domination of this counter-power around the city to force the collapse of the dominant system within cities. As the dominant power weakens within cities, counter-power can out-compete and ultimately supplant it.

In the stability of the past, revolutionaries could only imagine supplanting state power through insurrection and guerilla warfare. In the age of polycrisis and authoritarian rigidity, state power may bring its own collapse when nature doesn’t do the job.