Michel, I really liked the concept of United Transnational Republics and your
vision. To my ears, it comes very nice. It matches with my imagination of
building a Neo-Galiyevist and Bodpgdanite 'dictatorship' of networked
transnational of the oppressed peoples of the global south over oppressive
classes of the global north.
Galiev's original concept, of international of the oppressed peoples (of
colonies) was based on the idea of dictatorship (or hegemony) of the oppressed
peoples on the metropolises of the western capitalism, and he put Leninist and
Trotskyist world revolution model upside down on its heads, he also saw
federative and state centric vision. Another and more appropriate inspiration
for developing such conception would be thinking of zapatizm at global level as
in the argument of John Halloway.
Funny but last night I got a vision, woke up and wrote down; a name popped was
URRAS (United republics of regenerative advanced societies), as in the novel of
Leguin (the disspossed); a real utopia which could be build in parallel or on
top of the existing territorial, rural, metropolitan, spaces occupied by
state-capital-partnerships by the small scale participation mediated by
cyberspace, an operating system (like GNU) bu designed specifically for
building a transnational and trans-local world society. In URRAS, the time,
gender, means of exchange, production and reproduction, culture, communication,
all designed, build, and rebuild by and according to the needs of the people
who care themselves, each other, and the cosmos (nature on and beyond earth)..
I strongly agree, like you, that this sounds like science fiction novel, but
'the future ' is now and today, and if this real utopia is not seriously built
bottom up, no one would find the alternative dystopia less science-fictional
than this one.
Orsan
Why the P2P and Commons Movement Must Act Trans-Locally and Trans-Nationally
Text
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.”
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