Seize the Means of Community

Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty has become one of those books whose central distinction long ago escaped the book itself. When an organization or institution begins to fail us, we can leave it, or remain and try to change it. Loyalty complicates the relationship between those possibilities by holding exit at bay and giving voice more time and incentive to work.

Exit, voice, loyalty.

The scheme is powerful partly because so much of social life really can be described that way.

But the more I have thought about it, the more I have wondered whether something important happens when the institution itself becomes the object of political action.

Suppose the problem is not that an institution has stopped functioning as it should. Suppose it is functioning more or less as constituted, and the constitution of the institution is precisely what has become unacceptable.

Here I need to be careful about what Hirschman actually means by voice. His definition is very broad: essentially any attempt to change rather than escape an objectionable state of affairs, extending from petition and efforts to change management, to protest, and the mobilization of public opinion. Elsewhere he emphasizes that voice can range from faint complaint to violent protest.

So the problem is not that Hirschman simply rules transformative action out of the category of voice. Some of what I will propose that we call transformation could undoubtedly be described as voice in his terminology. The distinction appears elsewhere, in what the framework is principally trying to explain.

Hirschman repeatedly describes exit and voice as mechanisms of recuperation. The characteristic problem he envisions is deterioration that is remediable: an organization has fallen below its attainable performance and some combination of exit, voice, and loyalty may help get it “back on the track.”

But what happens when getting the institution back on the track is not the objective...because the track itself has become the problem? There seems to be a difference between trying to make an institution behave differently and trying to make a different institutional arrangement possible.

For want of a better word, I will call the latter transformation.

The Institution as an Object of Politics

The possibility is hardly foreign to American political language.

The Declaration of Independence famously says that people possess the right “to alter or to abolish” a form of government that has become destructive, and “to institute new Government.” It is tempting to treat that as the paradigmatic instance of transformation: petition fails, a revolutionary break occurs, and a new political order is founded. But I think that asks the Declaration to establish more than I need from it.

What matters here is the simpler proposition that the institutional order itself can become a legitimate object of political action. Government is not merely something within which politics happens. Its particular organization is contingent enough to be altered, abolished, or replaced. That is already a significant claim.

Modern American political culture commemorates an act of institutional transformation while often treating the institutional results of that transformation as considerably less transformable. We celebrate people who asserted a right to constitute a different order and then conduct much of ordinary politics within a vocabulary in which the inherited constitutional, economic, and organizational architecture has receded toward the status of background reality.

Not entirely, of course. Cooperatives exist. Community land trusts exist. Arguments about economic democracy, corporate power, workplace governance, constitutional reform, and alternative ownership have never disappeared. But they are easily pushed toward the margins of ordinary political debate, while disputes over the operation of familiar institutions occupy the center.

The corporation is largely given; politics concerns its regulation. The privately owned workplace is largely given; politics concerns wages and working conditions. The landlord-tenant relationship is largely given; politics concerns rents and protections.

Politics can therefore become extraordinarily contentious while leaving the organization of the institutions through which the contention occurs comparatively stable.

It is this distinction—not between moderation and militancy, nor quite between voice and something that is not voice, but between recuperating an institutional arrangement and making the arrangement itself politically contingent—that I find difficult to express within the framework as Hirschman develops it.

Hirschman as a Reluctant Ally

Initially, I found this particularly striking because of Hirschman’s own life. He fled Nazi Germany, fought in Spain, participated in the refugee rescue operation organized by Varian Fry in Marseille, and dedicated Exit, Voice, and Loyalty to his brother-in-law Eugenio Colorni, who was killed while participating in the Italian resistance.

My first reaction was almost accusatory. How could a man whose life had included resistance to intolerable political orders construct such an influential account of institutional response without giving transformation a category of its own?

I now think that may be the wrong question. Perhaps Hirschman’s biography does not make the absence anomalous. Perhaps it helps explain it.

Hirschman became one of the great twentieth-century intellectuals of modest possibility: suspicious of grand historical laws, suspicious of predetermined stages, suspicious of political projects confident that they already knew what an entire society ought to become. His temperament was experimental rather than totalizing. He was drawn to partial interventions, unexpected consequences, indirect paths, and possibilities disclosed in practice rather than imposed by blueprint.

There is something almost programmatic in the dedication of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty itself. Colorni, Hirschman writes, taught him about “small ideas” and how they may grow.

Seen that way, the politically salient idea of “transformation” available to him may have looked too much like precisely the thing he distrusted: rupture, comprehensive refounding, a project in which history is divided into before and after, and the new order is expected to emerge from a sufficiently decisive break with the old one.

Hirschman was certainly not unaware of revolutionary politics. He explicitly discusses the revolutionary claim that only sweeping change can release otherwise dormant or repressed social energies. What he does not do in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is make the transformation of the institutional framework itself a distinct object of the recuperative analysis he is constructing.

The interesting question therefore changes. It is no longer: why did Hirschman fail to see transformation? It becomes: did transformation recede from the framework because it had become too closely identified with rupture? That is a much more useful problem.

Hannah Arendt was a contemporary of Hirschman. Her political thought repeatedly returned to beginning, founding, and the human capacity to bring something unprecedented into existence and thus helps keep the larger category visible. But we need not choose between an Arendtian world of founding and a Hirschmanian world of recuperation and incremental adjustment. There may be forms of transformation that do not look much like founding moments at all.

Transformation Without the Grand Rupture

This is where Erik Olin Wright becomes especially useful.

Our political vocabulary is strangely thin between reform and revolution. Reform readily comes to mean making inherited institutions work somewhat differently. Revolution evokes a decisive break in which one order is displaced by another. Wright spent much of his later work trying to describe the enormous territory between them.

His language changed over time, but the central insight persisted: transformation need not depend upon a single revolutionary rupture. Alternative institutions and social relations can be built in the spaces of the existing order; political struggle can alter the conditions under which those alternatives survive and expand; functions can migrate from one kind of institution to another; arrangements that initially appear peripheral can become sufficiently interconnected that the larger ecology begins to change. His later phrase for this was “eroding capitalism.”

The word can sound misleadingly passive, as though capitalism were a shoreline and socialism merely a matter of waiting for the waves. Wright meant something more active. Institutions are built. Political protections are won. Capacities are accumulated. Relationships among institutions change. Activities that once required capitalist forms of organization become possible through other forms.

This is transformation, but it is not the transformation evoked by the Declaration’s revolutionary moment. The Declaration establishes transformability. Wright pluralizes the ways transformation might occur: interstitial revolution. And once the distinction is made, there is something unexpectedly Hirschmanian about Wright’s account.

It is experimental rather than blueprint-driven. It assumes incomplete knowledge. It allows different institutional forms to develop unevenly. It expects unintended consequences. It does not require history to wait for a single moment in which everything can finally be changed at once.

Perhaps the possibility I am trying to add is not the revolutionary opposite of Hirschman after all. Perhaps one route toward it passes through Hirschman’s own possibilism.

When Alternatives Become Consequential

There is an obvious difficulty, however, in talking about erosion this way: Existing power does not simply disappear because alternative institutions become more capable. If alternatives remain small enough, they may be tolerated.

A cooperative, a commons, a community land trust, a participant-governed institution, or an alternative communications network may occupy spaces that do not seriously threaten the prevailing organization of power. If such institutions become consequential enough, the situation changes.

The obvious possibility is confrontation. Property owners, employers, financial institutions, political authorities, or other incumbents may actively resist the transfer of capacities upon which their own power depends.

But confrontation is not the only danger. An alternative can also be absorbed. Its organizational form may survive while its practical function changes. A mutual institution can become increasingly indistinguishable from a conventional firm. A cooperative can survive by adapting itself so thoroughly to competitive pressures that little of its alternative logic remains. A once-participatory institution can professionalize, centralize, and gradually turn its members into clients. An innovation that began by displacing a prevailing institutional relationship can be purchased, incorporated, regulated, or normalized until it reinforces the surrounding order. Absorption may in some respects be the more difficult failure to recognize, because it does not announce itself as defeat.

Hirschman himself provides something suggestive here. Near the end of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, he warns that management can learn to blunt the mechanisms meant to correct it, converting voice from feedback into a mere safety valve through the institutionalization and domestication of dissent. His immediate subject is still organizational recuperation rather than transformation, but the problem has a familiar shape: institutions adapt to the pressures intended to alter them.

This is not an objection that Wright’s idea of erosion can simply dispose of. Nor do I have a general solution.

It does suggest that transformation cannot be measured merely by counting alternative institutions. The question is what relationships and capacities they actually reorganize, whether those changes persist, and what happens as the alternatives become sufficiently consequential to encounter the adaptive capacities of the surrounding order. The problem of transformation therefore remains political all the way down.

The Exit Trap

This brings me back to Hirschman from another direction.

There is a familiar response to criticism of a workplace, country, organization, platform, or economic arrangement:

If you don’t like it, leave.

Hirschman himself gives us a much richer understanding of exit than that slogan does. Indeed, one of the striking features of the book is his insistence that easy exit can sometimes weaken voice by removing precisely the members most likely to press effectively for change.

But the slogan reveals something about the political imagination in which exit can operate. It quietly equates remaining with consent.

You could leave. You have not left. Therefore you have accepted the institution.

The formal availability of exit retroactively launders the arrangement as voluntary.

But the inference works only if another possibility has already disappeared. I may remain precisely because I do not accept the institution as presently constituted. I may remain because leaving would surrender it to those who already control it. I may remain because the people with whom I share the consequences of the institution remain. I may remain because I want, with them, to participate in making it different.

Once transformation becomes thinkable, remaining no longer signifies acceptance. It may signify struggle.

This changes the meaning of voice as well. Voice need not merely seek better performance from an institution whose basic form remains intact. Hirschman’s own definition is broad enough to allow more than that. But once we distinguish recuperation from transformation, we can ask another question about voice: whether it is being used to restore an institutional arrangement or as part of the effort to constitute something different.

That seems particularly important from a socialist perspective. Socialism can easily be translated into a collection of demands concerning what capitalist institutions ought to deliver: higher wages, stronger benefits, public services, progressive taxation, regulation, better elected officials. Many such demands are valuable.

But socialism cannot finally mean that familiar institutions should produce nicer outcomes. At some point it raises institutional questions.

Who owns? Who governs? Who controls investment? Who decides how workplaces operate? Through what forms of association are common needs met? Which capacities are organized commercially, which publicly, which cooperatively, which as commons, and which through institutions we have not yet learned how to build?

Those are questions about the constitution of social life. And perhaps we have been poorly served by a political vocabulary that encourages us to imagine only two ways of reaching them: improve the existing order or overthrow it.

The Means of Transformation

Transformation can be gradual without being merely reformist. Institutions can be built, federated, democratized, displaced, appropriated, hollowed out, superseded, or deprived of functions that migrate elsewhere. Practices can begin inside an existing order and eventually change what that order can reproduce. Long periods of institutional accumulation may create capacities that matter when confrontation finally does occur. Moments of confrontation may in turn protect or extend capacities that were built much more slowly. There is no obvious reason transformation should have only one temporal shape.

But all of these possibilities depend upon something that political argument often treats as though it appeared spontaneously.

People must possess the capacity to make and sustain institutions together.

They need places in which relationships recur, ways of retaining common memory, procedures through which decisions become consequential, means of distributing responsibilities, opportunities to acquire competencies, and institutions through which things none of them can accomplish separately become collectively doable. In other words, transformation requires means through which collective capacity itself is produced.

That is where the phrase I have been using as the title of this blog—Seize the Means of Community—begins to seem less like a play on an old socialist slogan and more like a practical political question.

The means of production matter because they organize society’s capacity to produce. The means of community matter because they help organize society’s capacity to become a consequential we. And if transformation is something more than a choice between asking existing institutions to recover and waiting for the moment when they can all be swept aside, then perhaps those means are among the places we should begin looking for what comes after exit, voice, and loyalty.

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A sequel to this essay, “What If DSA Is More Than It Thinks It Is?”, will take up the practical question left here: if transformation depends on capacities for making and sustaining institutions together, where might those capacities be cultivated? It considers DSA as one possible site where they are already being produced, however unevenly, and asks what might follow if that production were treated as part of the politics itself.

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