Good synthesising exchange.. I am preparing a response to your reply on other tread Michel, re the class and alliances. Since here popped up the key issue before my reply, just wanted to drop it first. Yet again, to highlight, this tread is directly linked to other one.. So in one sentence, your below exchange address two logic that was positioned around the same old question: reform, revolution or REvolution... Although the tone of my initial brain storming sounded pretty much close to the ideas or questions raised by Willi, and also underlined by Fabio, and others, I also think that Michel's point is very important. Especially in the situation we are in, enourmous political, ideological, cultural, military and economic power is concentrated in the hands of state and capitalist ruling classes, and when they violently attacking each other -though by killing the most innocent and weak elements of the ruled classes least exploitable- to close the doors of fellowship and solidarity and collaborate with only those who think and label his/her self like us, would be a mortal mistake. This is also valid for solidarity and collaboration between those who thinks like Michel, so tackling both state and grassroots community solidarity networking at the same time, and those who chose only one of these either for reform or revolutionary change. Although Internet is a f**ked up space, what it did may be out of intention of the rulers, was produced a virtual social space where quantum logic works better then in the actual world. So thinking experiments can be made and applied on both reformist and revolutionary ideas, reflections can be shared and the message in visual, audio or text format, can be virally spread with the speed of light... the amount of the impact one can make on self or others consciousness is big. Of course here lies the essential thing the fights between projects/processes led by the agencies who are striving to determine the structural and overall outcomes (in real time); the intra-, inter- and may be cross-class struggles. To be able to win, we need to link as much brain that work with quantum logic as possible to emancipatory forces, which can talk to and collaborate with various ideas, events, people, communities and their networks, while linking them to each other as conscious and strategically as possible. So the growing networks could be interlocked smoothly and hopefully become meshed and genuinely p2p, so not allow falling back into centralisation, ending up being co opted to the fight between netarhical-capitalist or feudal-aristocratic classes, and let them take us down all together once more. here where I have been playing and praxising, collaborating with others directly and indirectly, from reform, revolution and REvolution perspectives.. There is also a network-map to visualise the ties: http://gnunion.wordpress.com/2014/07/22/gnunionize-in-solidarity/ orsan On 22 July 2014 11:30, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Fabio,
I'm responding inline
FABIO wrote
<So the questions: - Could it be more productive and effective to concentrate on "our" ground: P2P connections, direct connections between us, and focus on forming virtual and physical communities, do business, learn and teach together, produce and share our knowledge, holding up the "open" principle in whatever we do, instead of tackling the state level?>
But why not both? No social movement, whether it's labour, agrarian, women's rights, civil rights, LBTG etc .. has advanced without doing both at the same time. First we need to organize, but the state controls much of the funding and all of the regulation, so without tackling the state, no social victories are possible. The relative success and failure of the Ecuadorian flok experiment has to do, in my view, with the mismatch between what was announced, i.e. a strategic transition program fully supported by the govt, and the reality, which is that the top layers actively fought against it. The second weakness was its social basis, which was very limited. There was no real 'internal' demand. So the FLOK was a gamble, which would have worked very well if the support of the govt had been real, and worked much less, because that support turned out to be largely ilussory (but lower-level officials are engaged to make certain pilot projects happen as we speak).
Next time, the social basis would ideally be much stronger, so that social pressure can be exerted.
- Is the "Commons Transition" limited in any way if it doesn't espouse the "partner state" principle? Alternatives?
At this stage, in Ecuador, the partner state was only an idea, not a practice. Alternatives would be non-state and actually our next p2p-f project will be entirely non-state, and create collective civic structures to sustain a regional cooperative economy, BUT, can you imagine any fundamental phase transition , in a class society, that simply bypasses the state ? This would mean you have an expectation that the privileged layers and their state would simply sit idly by while their privileges are dismantled. So for me, confronting and transforming the state remains vital in any transition. But do not confuse the partner state, where the state ARE the people, with the market or bureaucratic state. Think Ancient Athens and free free medieval cities. In the meantime, we have to find allies within the complex state apparatus, who are willing to do prefigurative experiments.
<- On the other hand, we could think of a "Commons Utopia". How would it operate, would there be a state? What about the law system for example? How would a "Transitioned Commons" body be organized? Anarchy? Or is it beyond the P2P idea to address the state level itself?>
my own positioning is here .. in a nutshell, since I do not believe in the near term realization of a classless society, I think we should opt for a pluralistic commonwealth, which retains civic, private and state forms but each one internally transformed and with a new configuration, see http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-basic-orientation-of-p2p-theory-towards-so...
for the state level, I see the realization of liquid democracy as the transforming agent
<I think to have understood that societal transitions don't occur in isolation, or in niches, or layers, but as holistic expressions of the current world view. Please forgive the rhetoric, but collaboration, sharing, community, connection, along sustainability and harmony with our environment and fellow living beings are new values no doubt emerging more and more (along with their dark sides though: totalitarianism, control, centralization, domination), which are though still trapped in a corset of the status quo. So maybe with time things may "just" emerge, and we should just joyfully play along and try things out, create, throw away, fork and share. Utopias don't seem to work well in reality.>
things never just emerge, they are always confronted with pressure to coopt, adapt etc ... and create hybrid realities .. so the difficult question remains, how to obtain more autonomy in these very difficult circumstances ...
I don't have the answer to that, but my choice is to pragmatically connect the peer producing, commons oriented communities, in order to strenghten their networks, and find the appropriate political and social expression so that they can become powerful change agents in the wider society and economy.
-- Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation