Swarmwise, the tactical manual to changing the world, by Rick Falkvinge
— submitted by Jeff Roby, 06/06/14
From the introduction:
“On June 7, 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European elections, becoming the largest party in the most coveted subthirty demographic. Our campaign budget was fifty thousand euros. Our competitors had spent six million. We had spent less than 1 percent of their budget and still beat them, giving us a cost-efficiency advantage of over two orders of magnitude. This was entirely due to working swarmwise, and the methods can translate to almost any organized large-scale activity. This book is about that secret sauce.
“A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.”
If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?
A smartass comment of days gone by. Pertaining to Swarmwise, let me start as a nattering nabob of negativity. One might ask why, given Swarmwise’s extravagant claims and in Sweden’s case a real track record of success, swarms of millions aren’t rocking the planet (and the U.S., and Florida) right now? And why are brilliant activists even bothering to call on a near-dead, bureaucratized dinosaur like the Green Party of Florida (GPFL) to adopt the swarm methodology at all? Wouldn’t a truly effective Green swarm simply bypass the corpse of the GPFL in about 24 hours or less? (note: population of Sweden: about 9.5 million, population of Florida: about 19.5 million.)
The seeming trick is that the “focus in the swarm is always on what everybody can do, and never what people cannot or must do.” (p.17) The swarm takes that initial simple activity, and it goes viral exponentially until achieving critical mass. The art of the swarm is to maintain its swarm-like character while becoming a coherent political force.
But what is it that the GPFL can devise which masses of people can (the easy part) and will (the hard part) do? Or to raise the bar a bit, can and will do to further the professed strategic aims of the Green Party? (After all, it’s not clear what 10 million Green twerkers would do to create jobs and eradicate poverty.)
The genius of the swarm is that it provides a method of organizing and harnessing the force of a mass movement, not allowing the bureaucratic calcification that would throttle its continued growth. I believe that Falkvinge underplays the existence (admits it, yes, but leaves it inadequately analyzed) of the underlying state (or non-state) of the mass movement, and in the case of the Sweden’s Pirate Party, its already existing energy and rage at injustice. So “[i]n 2006, about 1.2 million citizens — voters — in Sweden were sharing culture and knowledge in violation of the copyright monopoly and didn’t see anything wrong with that, but were still being actively demonized by the establishment.” (p.24) GPFL take note!
Faded memories of days gone by
Youthful enthusiasts may be forgiven for not having been taught revolutionary history, but the Pirate Party was not the first example of swarm activity.
The Paris Commune of 1871 was such. Under conditions of France losing the Franco-Prussian war, the workers of Paris took over the city and established egalitarian self-rule. The Communards did not make use of the internet. They also did not march on Versailles and finish off the government forces gathered there. Versailles marched on Paris and slaughtered the Communards in the tens of thousands.
January 1905 Petrograd. (Russia, not Florida.) That year, hundreds of peaceful demonstrators led by a priest were machine-gunned by the czar’s troops as they carried forward their peaceful petitions to show the “Little Father” who was being misled by his advisers. Organized by the Petrograd Soviet (an ultra-democratic body of worker/peasant/soldier self-rule) they took to the streets. Battles raged through the city and countryside of Russia for nearly a year, until the czar’s army decisively crushed them. Lenin’s Bolsheviks were not major players in what is known as the dress rehearsal for 1917. Neither the Petrograd Soviet nor the Bolsheviks made great use of the internet.
1917 Petrograd. Still stubbornly refusing to Twitter each other on the internet, the workers again took to the streets. This time around, organized by both the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolsheviks, they also took the telegraph and railroad stations. The swarm spread to the army (“Give me one good regiment!” the generals roared, but there were no good regiments to be found) and the outcome was somewhat different.
In the U.S. 1777 (or the colonies as they were then called), the farmers swarmed out of the fields and forests to join the Continental Army in surrounding an entire British army at Saratoga. (Then went back to their farms.)
Post-1905, swarm organizers (the IWW) stood on street corner soapboxes, got arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence, and filled the jails until they had to be driven out of town and on their way to the next Free Speech Fight. Both Facebook free.
Flash forward to the 60’s, the anti-war movement. The swarm grew and grew, constantly experimenting, constantly changing. Organizations sprang up, tried to direct it. Some deliberately tried to contain it. All were swept away by the rising tide. Then it ran into the guns of the Ohio National Guard, exploded in massive rage for about a week, then began its slow death slide into the hungry clutches of the McGovern campaign. Its problem was not lack of hot spots.
As a nittering nabob of negativity …
I relate the above-cited examples for a reason. Falkvinge’s book is quite brilliant, but off the top it suffers from a form of Pirate exceptionalism, does not locate the Swedish experience in an extended process of the swarm’s evolution, each incidence unique in its particular way. So Lenin’s Bolsheviks did “march on Versailles.” The 60’s could not have happened as they did without television, etc. Falkvinge mentions that Sweden and Europe have a multi-party system. He doesn’t really consider the challenges the lack of that poses in the U.S., and more tellingly doesn’t consider how his success has been absorbed, at least in part, into the system.
He repeatedly makes statements like “your role is to set goals and ambitions, ambitions that don’t stop short of changing the entire world for the better.” (p.62) “So shoot for Mars instead! That project would energize people, electrify people. In contrast, you’ll never get a swarm energized around the idea of making the most professional tax audit.” (p.126)
Perhaps the Pirate experience’s greatest contribution to changing the world is to broaden our own horizons, as there is indeed much to learn there. The party had impact on the government stance on copyright, but the issue has moved off the front burner, and as a revolutionary force, its impact is spent. In the book, Falkvinge attributes a loss of support for the Pirate parties of Sweden and Germany to bureaucratization, arising from a failure of will to keep to the swarm’s dynamic principles. But “failure of will” is one of the most traditional ways to avoid looking at the broader social / economic / political conditions in which that will failed.
Thus the whole history of the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the 30 Years War can be explained as a failure to consistently apply the pure teachings of Jesus. To be charitable, that explanation is not particularly helpful.
A case closer to home is the Green Party’s own experience following the 2000 Nader campaign. I cover some of this in my piece Confessions of an Occasional Democrat, as the party devolved into the Safe State strategy of 2004. But what happened with the viral energy of 2000 in 2001 and 2002? The failure to seize that moment, setting the stage for the party’s wretched performance in 2004? Failure of will may describe it, but it hardly explains it.
The Devil gets his (or her) due
But now I must give the devil her due. Debates hauntingly similar to today’s have raged for well over a century, echoing age-old accusations of “downplaying the significance of the spontaneous element.” The spontaneous element is often thought to arise seemingly “out of nowhere,” and given almost mystical powers of transformation. Historically, the spontaneous element is described as coming out of nowhere, or at most out of mindless popular rage, when in fact it emerges under the radar of the official historians, politicians and pundits who do not have the conceptual tools to comprehend it. Serious historical study usually reveals very specific conditions, and seminal forms of organization in place, well before the explosion.
Thus one thing Falkvinge gives us is a bird’s-eye view of how he organized mass sentiment, i.e., outrage, against the abuse of copyright law, into a political party that could win seats in the European Parliament. He provides us a “tactical manual,” allowing us to perhaps replicate the method if not the specifics of that experience.
So now, as I said, we have to give the devil her due. After all, if we just dismiss the devil with cheap shots, we deprive ourselves of our own best understanding. In fact, Falkvinge exposes some of the weaknesses of the swarm method, often charmingly openly, sometimes inadvertently. To my lights, the greatest one is that such reliance on spontaneity, even a brilliantly and rigorously “organized spontaneity” (I see no contradiction in that phrasing) gives the movement great strength, but also imposes deadly tactical and strategic limits on what can be done, and what must be done. Recall the quote at the beginning, “focus in the swarm is always on what everybody can do, and never what people cannot or must do.”
But if you must move the goalposts …
Falkvinge does acknowledge that there are times when the swarm must redirect its efforts. He emphasizes that it is difficult. An important passage:
“At some point, you may want to adjust the goals of the swarm. For a political party, this is almost inevitable. For a single-issue swarm, it is more avoidable. Nevertheless, it creates very difficult problems in the face of the swarm’s disorganization. … After all, people have joined you in the swarm to accomplish something specific. If the reason they joined no longer exists, what are they doing in the swarm? What are they going to do with all the friendships they have built? What about all the energy and identity vested in the swarm? This creates a fundamental energy crisis with the swarm and an identity crisis with activists who have joined the swarm. For this reason, if you should ever need to repurpose or regoal the swarm, you need to get a very high level of buy-in for this. You need to be aware that there will be a high degree of pushback, as your new goal or method isn’t why people have joined. The costs will be high, but sometimes, it will also be the only way through, if the swarm has learned that the initially pictured goals or methods for attaining them weren’t possible.” (pp.175–176)
As Falkvinge characterizes it, the shift is mainly from one narrow issue and tactic, to another equally narrow issue and tactic. A broad multi-issue swarm is, to his methodology, a veritable contradiction in terms. How can such an organization even exist. One answer is that multi-issue organizations (such as the Green Party) are held together by a vision and a strategic understanding that allow them to tactically maneuver among many issues and tactical situations without tearing themselves apart. But such organizations are inherently smaller, more difficult to create. Such organizations, however, are required for what history determines “must be done.”
Walking and chewing gum at the same time
An ideal model, of course, is to have multiple swarms, within which the strategically oriented group operates and provides direction. But that’s a whole other discussion beyond the scope of this one.
Actually, the dilemma Falkvinge describes above, “people have joined you in the swarm to accomplish something specific. If the reason they joined no longer exists, what are they doing in the swarm?” faces the Green Party as well, in the tension between its hardcore environmentalist base and those inspired by Jill Stein’s Green New Deal, who have both a personal and, more importantly, strategic commitment to strongly engage the issues of jobs, healthcare and poverty. Thus there are forces in the party who would have us “return to our roots” as a strictly environmental party and dump all this other nonsense that detracts from our (alleged) popularity.
I, of course, consider myself a Steinista. One could claim that beneath my red veneer I am nothing but a bleeding heart liberal (okay, it bleeds, so what?) but beyond that I believe to the core of my being that if our party and movement do not include the poor, our hopes for social transformation are for naught.
By the rules of the swarm, the Green Party should split in two (or probably 10) separate organizations with each pursuing their favorite issues. By the rules of the swarm, if I cannot find the right gimmick to get the poor to swarm with me, it’s either due to my lack of proper intelligence, a failure of my own responsibility to find a tactic that could generate mass mobilization within two days. Or it could just be that the poor are not swarmworthy, and so much the worse for them. It would be a violation of swarm ethics to push to get the party’s efforts turned in that direction ( and so much the worse for us being a multi-issue organization).
Note: Per Falkvinge: “a women’s rights party in Sweden — which is already among the most gender-equal countries in the world — potentially affects a full half of the voter base. But can you activate a large enough portion of those people on the idea of further equalization of the genders? (It was tried. It turned out that you couldn’t.)” (p.26) So much the worse for women.
See Part 2
