Why the P2P and Commons Movement Must Act Trans-Locally and Trans-Nationally

Michel Bauwens (Madison, Wisconsin), June 12, 2016:

“One of the best books I have read in the last ten years is undoubtedly, The Structure of
World History, by Kojin Karatini. Karatini focuses on world history as an evolution of
‘modes of exchange’, i.e. how humans produce, but most of all , ‘exchange’ value. Like
Alan Page Fiske, in ‘Structures of Social Life’, Karatini recognizes four basic ways of
doing this, and this modes exists at all times and in all places. For example, while the
dominance of capitalism is new, markets have existed since very early times ; or, if the
dominance of the state was new after the replacement of tribal systems, distribution
depending on rank, pre-existed its dominance. This insight is very important because it
allows us to recognize that any political and economic system is not just one modality,
but an integration of modalities. As Dmytri Kleiner says, “we live in a multi-modal
world’, and ‘if the capitalists won, its because there were capitalists already’.
It is quite different to see capitalism as a mere mode of production, and then to declare
the state and the nation as mere epiphenomena of capital, as marxists used to do, or to
insist as Karatini does, that capitalism is really a triarchy combining Capital-State-
Nation.
The reason the present system is so strong, is that the three act in concert, and whenever
one is endangered, the two other systems mobilize to its rescue.
What I want to do now is to interpret Karatini’s insight, by adding another layer of
analysis, that of Karl Polanyi, expressed in his landmark book, The Great
Transformation. Polanyi’s book is a history of the emergence and perpetuation of
capitalism from the late 18th century to the 1940’s, in which he sees a double movement
at play. In some periods, the market forces are dominant, but by being dominant, they
actively subvert the order of society and dislocate it, putting many people in danger;
thus, society reacts through mobilisations and forces the market back into a more ‘social
order’. Think of how the labor movement forced a re-alignment of society around the
welfare state, and how the counter-revolution of the 80s deregulated these social
protections in favour of the 1%. Now let’s recount this dynamic in Karatini’s scheme.
When capital becomes too dominant in the Capital-State-Nation system, the nation, the
locus of community and reciprocity dynamics, revolts and mobilizes, and forces the
state to discipline Capital.
Many observers were puzzled that despite the systemic crisis of 2008, there seems to be
a lack of such an expected counter-movement, but that was just social inertia at play.
Now, in 2016, we are in the midst of a Polanyian backlash nearly everywhere. Both
Trump and Sanders in the current US electoral cycle, represent the Polanyian double
movement, and are reacting against the effects of neoliberalism and its destruction of
the U.S. middle class. Trump represents the ‘national’ business interests, trying to
mobilize the declining white middle class and workers, while Sanders represent the new
generations of workers who are suffering from precarity. The signs of this Polanyian
counter-movement are visible nearly everywhere.
Nevertheless, there is a bug in the (Polanyian) double movement !
And the bug is that ‘Capital’ has developed a trans-national logic and capacity.
Globalized and financial neoliberalism has fundamentally weakened the capacity of the
nation-state to discipline its activities.
So, faced with a all-powerful transnational capitalism, the various nation-state systems
have proven pretty powerless to effect any change. This is one of the explanations of the
deep distrust that people are feeling towards the current political system, which simply
fails to deliver towards any majoritarian social demand. Look at how the moderately
radical Syriza movement in Greece was put under a European protectorate and had to
abandon Greek sovereignty, or look at how the more antagonistically oriented
Venezuelan government is crumbling. Along with other progressive governments in
Latin America. So, while the electorate may vote for parties that promise to change the
status quo, and bring to power eventually movements like Podemos, a Labour Party
under the leadership of Corbyn, or a Democratic Party strongly influenced by the
Sanders movement, their capacities for change will be severely restricted. Our own
recommendations in the P2P Foundation, following our work on Commons Transitions,
is that progressive coalitions at the city and nation-state level should first of all develop
policies that increase the capacity for autonomy of citizens and the new economic forces
aligned around the commons. Simply initiating left-Keynesian state policies will not be
sufficient and will in all likelihood be met with stiff trans-national opposition. These
pro-commons policies should be focused not just on local autonomy, but on the creation
of trans-national and trans-local capacities, interlinking the efforts of their citizens and
ethical and generative entrepreneurs to the global civic and ethical entrepreneurial
networks that are currently in development. To be realistic, except in very rare locales,
such as perhaps in Barcelona under the En Comu coalition or in Bologna, the current
progressive movements are still very much wedded to the old industrial models.
This means that the current p2p and commons forces must also focus on the creation of
trans-local and trans-national capacities.
What can we do ? Currently, there is an exponential increase in the number of civic and
cooperative initiatives, outside of the state and corporate world, as documented for
example by Tine De Moor in Homo Cooperans for the Netherlands. Most of these
initiatives are locally oriented, and that is absolutely necessary and legitimate. It is vital
that citizens transition here and now to new models of food and energy provisioning and
any other domain that needs to be changed from an extractive model that is destroying
the environment and undermining society, to generative models that create added value
to the shared resource base that citizens are co-constructing everywhere. Ezio Manzini
has already taught us that in the networked age, there is no such thing as pure locality,
and that these are all SLOC initiatives, i.e. they are Small and Local, but also Open and
Connected. We also know that there are today movements that operate beyond the local
and use global networks to organize themselves. A good example may be the Transition
Town movement, and how it uses networks to empower local groups.
But this is not enough, at least in our opinion. What we are thinking and proposing is
the active creation of trans-local and trans-national structures, that actively aim to have
global effects and change the power balance on the planet.
The only way to achieve systemic change at the planetary level is to build counter-
power, i.e. alternative global governance. The transnational capitalist class must feel
that its power is curtailed, not just by nation-states which may organize themselves
inter-nation-ally, but by transnational forces representing the global commoners and
their livelihood organizations.
How can we do this ?
Las Indias, a trans-national hispanic community, has introduced, inspired by cyberpunk
literature and specifically from the book The Diamond Age from Neal Stephenson, the
notion of ‘phyles’.
Phyles are trans-national business eco-systems that sustain a community and its
commons, and they are already successful for certain ethnic and religious communities
that operate on the global level, such as the soufi ‘mourabite’ communities from
Senegal, and the indigenous communities of Otovallo in Ecuador, where the trans-
migrant income-generating systems are said to represent one third of GDP. These
globally operating networks are described in the book, the book by Alain Tarrius,
entitled, “Etrangers de passage. Poor to poor, peer to peer” (Editions de l’Aube, 2015).
So my argument is that we need to construct phyles for peer production communities.
Remember the structure of commons-based peer production most commonly consists of
three institutions. One, the contributory community co-creating the shared resources
(the open source communities), two, the entrepreneurial coalitions creating livelihoods
around those shared resources. At the P2P Foundation, we favour ‘generative’, ‘ethical
entrepreneurial coalitions’, which strengthen commons and their contributory
communities and create an economy for them. These generative trans-local and trans-
nationally operating coalitions already exist. Amongst the best known are Enspiral,
originally based in New Zealand ; Sensorica, originally based in Montreal, Canada ; Las
Indias, mostly based in Spain but with many hispanic members from Latin America; the
Ethos Foundation in the UK. We believe this new type of trans-local organizations are
the seed form of future global coalitions of generative entrepreneurs, sustaining global
open design communities. Our working for this trend is the eventual creation of a
United Phyles Organization, which is represented at the local level by the territorial
Chambers of Commons.
We also believe that global civic organizations from the commons sphere should do the
same. Our working name for these are the United Transnational Republics.
We are fully aware that these are at present science-fictional notions, but if we don’t
build them, it will be the extractive multi-national organizations of capital that will rule
our world, destroy our planet, and reduce the world population to generalized precarity.
This construction is by no means impossible, and we can see already the construction of
many globally nomadic structures as well as global civic mobilizations such as those
against climate change. But we can’t just protest and ask the ‘state’ and ‘states’ to do
our bidding; we cannot just rely on the weak inter-national structures such as those of
the United Nations. We must build ‘counter-hegemonic’ power at the global level. This
means building global open design communities, and the global phyles that go with it.
At the production level, this means replacing neoliberal globalization, which is
destroying the biosphere, with cosmo-local production coalitions. These follow the rule,
‘what is heavy is local, what is light is global’. They combine global open design
communities, global open cooperatives and phyles, i.e. organizing coordination systems
at the trans-local and trans-national scale, with relocalized distributed manufacturing.
At the political level, this means building territorial assemblies for citizens, the
Assemblies of the Commons, and assemblies for generative entrepreneurial entities, the
Chambers of the Commons, and to scale them at the national, regional and global levels.
This continuous meshworking at all levels, is what will create the basis to create
systemic change, i.e. power to change, at the level where the destructive force of global
capital and its predation of the planet and its people can be countered.
Let me stress that this does not mean a destructive all-out conflict. Dmytri Kleiner has
proposed a strategy of trans-vestment, i.e. the transfer of value from one modality to
another. Enspiral has created a vehicle, based on ‘capped returns’, which is able to
accept external investments, which are then ‘subsumed’ to the values of the generative
coalition. At the P2P Foundation, we have proposed reciprocity-based licenses, which
allows the commercialization of open source knowledge on the basis of reciprocity,
creating a protective membrane around the ethical phyles. The Assembly of the
Commons in Lille is discussing a trans-vestment vehicle for the state, called a General
Public License, which allows the assembly to work with the world of politics and
government, while maintaining the autonomy of the commoners.
This has been done before. “If capitalists became dominant, it is because there were
capitalists’. The reason our current market society came about , is that Europe being at
the margins of Empire, never was able to consolidate centralized power, allowing
independent cities where the merchants could exist and expand their power, and this
social force became dominant after the fall of the absolute monarchs.
Commoners exist, there’s three billion of us in digital commons, and likely just as much
relying on physical commons, and they have to follow the same multi-modal strategy,
i.e. prefiguratively build their power and influence at all levels, trans-vesting state and
market forces to strengthen the commons. For this of course, just as laborers did, we
have to develop a consciousness that we are commoners. Anyone participating and co-
constructing shared resources without exploiting them, is in fact a commoner. And as
the current global system becomes increasingly dysfunctional, more and more of us
have to rely on the commons, and not on the market and the state, for our very survival.
If the world of the merchants became the world of Capital-State-Nation, an integration
of various modalities under the dominance of the market forces, then the world of the
commoners will be a new integration: Commons – Ethical Economy – Partner State.
Because we live in a multi-modal world, it does not make sense, and is impossible, to
create a ‘totalitarian’ commons world, but we can aim for a commons-centric world, in
which market forces and state functions (rule and protect, plunder and distribute) are
‘disciplined’ at the service of the commons and the commoners. Like capital did before
us, we must build our strength, within a multi-modal world. Paradoxically, I believe it is
because the ‘extractive’ model is incompatible with our survival, that the time for a
‘generative’ transition will come and is in fact not just indispensable, but likely.
The commons is civil society, where citizens contribute to the commons and choose
where they invest their care for the common good of their communities, the planet and
humanity; the ethical economy consists of the livelihood organizations of the
commoners, where generative market practices add value for the commoners and the
commons ; and the ‘state’ of the commons, presently prefigured by the for-benefit
associations which manage the infrastructures of cooperation of the open source
communities, is the ‘partner state’ which enables and empowers the capacities of
individuals and communities to participate and contribute to the commons of their
choice.
This fundamental transformation of our social, political and economic systems, requires
more than a local approach, it requires trans-local practices and forms of organization.
Let’s get to work.”