The literary dream of transnational cooperativism
The birth of cyberpunk
Cyberpunk has gone down in the history of science fiction as a subgenre marked by dystopian exploration. Neuromancer(1984), the novel by William Gibson, often considered the start of the wave that would mark the next fifteen years, certainly fits the definition.
At the time, however, the novel was not perceived as the birth of a literary movement but rather as the consecration of a brilliant author leading the way forward for a nebulous group of young people with university training and digital experience who were beginning to pose new themes in post-industrial scenarios far removed from the space operas inherited from the Asimovian era.
The first attempt at a reinterpretation in terms of the movement would arrive almost immediately afterward by the hand of Bruce Sterling and his novel, Mirrorshades, the cyberpunk anthology (1986). But the truth is that in the second half of the eighties Neuromancer is considered to be essentially an "author's novel", rather than a paradigm shift in science fiction. It is not understood as the manifesto of a literary current but rather as the entry of science fiction into great literature. This is, at least, the general interpretation until 1989, when Dan Simmons published Hyperion. Hyperion is a true homage to English literature and its history, recounted in the form of a coherent narrative arc going from the Cantebury Tales to ........ Neuromancer. Sterling himself had just published Schismatrix (1985), a space opera.
And the reality is that turning Gibson's momentum into the basis of a school or at least a generation of writers was not so easy. Sterling could select stories and authors of his age and recover precursor works like Rudy Rucker's Software (1982) or P.K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), but it was clear that his strategy would have no real chance of success if a novel as iconic as Gibson's failed to make a reappearance in the scene.
Envisioning a future marked by Mondragon, globalization and digitalization
After Bruce Sterling wrote an incredible collection of short stories experimenting with new scenarios and situations that would not be published until 1989, he wrote what would become the next iconic cyberpunk novel marking the true birth of Cyberpunk, Islands in the Net (1988), an epic and earthy non-utopian novel light years away from the dystopian genre.
The main inspiration for the main plot of Islands in the Net was the I Congress of the Mondragon Cooperative Group, which had taken place the previous year. In it, what had been known until then as Mondragon's cooperatives laid the foundations to become the corporation as it is known today. At the time they had a total of 18,262 worker-members and a turnover of 1,081.82 million euros, of which 213.96 million euros were due to exports. Immense figures for a Spanish company at the time, let alone a workers' cooperative.
If Sterling wanted to imagine a world marked by conflicts diametrically opposed to those of the Cold War, still omnipresent and seemingly endless in 1988, and at the same time localize the germ of a new movement capable of turning the world upside down, there was no better starting point. He called it Economic Democracy, at the time a novelty. The other two ingredients of the non-utopia he had set in motion were also in the germinal stage then: globalization and digitalization.
Transnational cooperativism according to Sterling
The ideas and institutions at the center of the story blew away the minds of many readers and young cooperativists of the time. Especially because the "corporations" protagonizing the story were actually transnational worker cooperatives organized as gigantic collectivities based on collective ownership...
We were surprised to see that, without Rizome, you scarcely own anything! Sure, you’ve got shares, but the things you’ve built don’t belong to you—you just run them for your corporation. I’ve known plumbers with bigger salaries than you have!
... with a dermercantilizing moral guiding daily life, a true affirmation of abundance.
— … a kind of innkeeper?
— We in Rizome don’t have “jobs,” Dr. Razak. Just things to do and people to do them.
— My esteemed colleagues of the People’s Innovation Party might call that “inefficient.”
— Well, our idea of efficiency has more to do with personal fulfillment than, uh, material possessions.
— I understand that large numbers of Rizome employees do no work at all..
— Well, we take care of our own. Of course a lot of that activity is outside the money economy. An invisible economy that isn’t quantifiable in dollars.
— In ecu1, you mean.
— Yes, sorry. Like housework: you don’t get any money for doing it, but that’s how your family survives, isn’t it? Just because it’s not in a bank doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Incidentally, we’re not “employees,” but “associates.”
— In other words, your bottom line is ludic joy rather than profit. You have replaced “labour,” the humiliating specter of “forced production,” with a series of varied, playlike pastimes. And replaced the greed motive with a web of social ties, reinforced by an elective power structure.
— Yes, I think so … if I understand your definitions.
— How long before you can dispose of “work” entirely?
A moral that, in a way, permeates the totality of society, transforming individual identities and leading them towards the valuation and centrality of work and knowledge.
"Laura, I like my possessions and I’ve paid for all of them. Maybe people don’t prize possessions now like we did in the premillennium. How could they? All their money goes into the Net. For games, or business, or television—things that come over the wires".
She zipped her bag shut. “Young people these days, maybe they don’t hanker after a Mercedes or a Jacuzzi. But they’ll brag like sixty about their data access.”
Laura felt impatient.
“That’s silly, Mother. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of what you know. A Mercedes is just a machine. It doesn’t prove anything about you as a person.”
This moral fuels not only transnational cooperatives such as Rizome, Kimera or Farmen, but a whole multitude of groups that, inside and outside, create technological innovation, building a force increasingly in conflict with the States.
This isn’t politics. This is technology. It’s not their power that threatens us, it’s their imagination. Creativity comes from small groups. Small groups gave us the electric light, the automobile, the personal computer. Bureaucracies gave us the nuclear power plant, traffic jams, and network television. The first three changed everything. The last three are memories now.
The revolutionary conflict of the sterlinian future
This is the origin of the ultimate conflict that fuels the plot and that we discover at the same time as the protagonist.
In the world of Islands on the Net the national states maintain a certain hegemony around the Vienna Convention, an international agreement that unites them in the control of the economic democracies and the enclaves (tax and data havens) in which, the pirates and all those who for whatever reason try to escape state control, keep their accounts, their secrets and their money.
Throughout the novel, states would increasingly resort to military interventions to control the growth of anything that escapes them, making ever more assiduous use of FACT (Free Army of Counter-Terrorism), the military intervention unit of the Vienna Convention countries. FACT has made Mali its base of operations, destroying in the process the failed local state. But their control is not total. Their power is challenged by Tuareg guerrillas, who, like other anti-globalization movements around the world, proclaim that the only way to maintain their autonomy is to return to a pre-digital technological state.
Meanwhile, some of the economic democracies, such as Rizome, still continue to think in terms of national loyalties, or at least loyalty to the international system. They conceive of themselves as operating on a different plane from the states. However, other economic democracies, such as Kimera, take notice of the opportunity to create a new post-national order and not recognize identity loyalties outside their own home.
The novel ends in 2025 with a meeting between the social council of Rizome - which the protagonist has just joined - and that of Kimera, which is grouping the other economic democracies to force its entry into the Vienna Convention on an equal footing with the states and dismantle the FACT by creating in its place an equivalent of its own.
"But you’re talking global revolution!"
“Call it ‘rationalization,’” Yoshio suggested, handing Mika a plate. “It sounds nicer. We remove unnecessary barriers in the flow of the global Net. Barriers that happen to be governments.”
“But what kind of world would that give us?”
“It would depend on who made the new rules,” Yoshio said. “If you join the winning side, you get to vote. If not, well …” He shrugged.
“Yeah? What if your side loses?”
“Then the nations get to fight over us, to try us for treason,” Mika said. “The courts could sort it out. In fifty years maybe.”...
“Rizome elections are coming up soon,” Yoshio said. “You say you’re economic democrats. If you believe in the Net—if you believe your own morality—you cannot escape this issue. Why not put it to a vote?”
Thirty-six years later
Changes in the world
In every historical period there are systemic tendencies - what the logic of the economic system drives -, reactive tendencies - the resistance of the displaced who seek a reverse gear - and anti-systemic tendencies, which seek to overcome the system.
The historical period that opened 36 years ago set in motion globalization, digitalization and military interventionism of state coalitions - the systemic tendencies -, we had a revival of Islamic fundamentalism, of a certain anti-digital Luddism and even of Tuareg nationalism - the regressive tendencies. But it did not give rise to large economic democracies, nor to a new moral of work and knowledge beyond small nuclei - the anti-systemic tendencies that Sterling had proposed in Islands in the Net.
The only anti-systemic tendency that reached a notable level in the period was the free software community movement, spearhead of the new universal commons. Meanwhile, the hegemonic sector in the cooperative world eroded the foundations of cooperativism to the point of its almost total disappearance from the public scene as a social alternative.
That scenario has been breaking down by leaps and bounds since 2017, or if you prefer, since the financial crisis of 2008. With a few months to go until 2025, the year in which the Economic Democracies were considering in the novel the takeover of global power, the current outlook is not an overcoming of the states and the international order based on military interventions, but rather a new division of the world into armed blocs organized around the exigencies of militarism coupled with the apparently unchallenged use of war as a recourse. On the other hand, the shift from distributed Internet to the Internet of Services, highly capitalized and centralized by Big Tech, to the Internet of AI, also highly capitalized and centralized by Big Tech, has radically changed the way of looking at digitalization. Innovation and distributed technologies no longer appear to present to anyone an alternative to politics when it comes to distributing power and making way for the communal.
Economic Democracy in our century
Islands in the Net expressed for the first time the dream of a transnational cooperativism capable of offering its members an alternative that would simultaneously tackle the erosion of social cohesion that was then emerging under Reagan and Thatcher, and the fracture, growing steadily since the post-war period, between the general conditions of life and access to resources and knowledge in the most capitalized countries and the rest.
Today we are not where the protagonists of the novel were in the 2024 imagined by Sterling. We do not have great economic democracies like the Rizome, Kimera or Farben of the novel, we have something much more modest: Communalia, an international association born to create mechanisms of solidarity, collective work and social action between worker cooperatives in different parts of Europe. It does not have a cover, but it is real and contributes to our surrounding environment in each of the places where the member cooperatives are based or work.
Today, finally, the idea of a transnational and abundance-oriented worker cooperativism is no longer a dream or a literary utopia, it is a work in progress.