Dear Brian, thanks for this extremely interesting and important response; and I'm of course very please that you see a convergence with the Commons Transition Plan we've been working on here in Quito. Of course, a word of warning, it's a plan, and though it informs the 15 policy proposals, it is really uncertain about how much of it will have a real effect here in Ecuador. I think it's real importance is that it is crafted as a first attempt to make concrete the emergent commons thinking of the social movements as actual potential policy. Some more repliles inline, but only where I have something specific to add. I am sharing it with 3 mailings lists who should know about your analysis and insights On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 2:41 PM, Brian Holmes <[email protected]>wrote:
Michel, it's great to hear from you. Your ideas are often on my mind: I consider you the most precise, most generous and least compromised exponent of the cooperative economy, which is clearly the best thing to have emerged out of the short-lived growth surge of the 1990s. It is typical of you to write immediately whenever someone expresses anything like an idea or a proposal. Your attentiveness is really much appreciated.
Also I am intrigued about Jaap's presentation on the Eurasian corridors. I would be glad to know more. Please feel free to forward this to the networked labor list. I tried to subscribe but I'm still waiting for the answer.
I copied your answer to the list , and to Orsan in particular, who may be able to add you
There is so much to say. I'd like to begin answering your questions with a bit of a preamble. It seems to me that whether or not one refers explicitly to Kondratiev, Schumpeter, Mandel, Freeman & Louca, etc, the idea of long cycles of growth punctuated by major crises (40 or 50 years from trough to trough) is widely shared at this point, among state planners, corporate elites, neo-Marxists, technology boosters and probably others as well. And it has been widely shared as far back as the '70s. After all, the lessons of the 1930s, and of the rise of state-orchestrated Fordism in the postwar period, were there for all to see. During the 1970s, in the context of the last long downturn before the present one, these ideas were again debated on the left, particularly due to Mandel. But they were also applied by the state and corporate sectors. I believe we can discern their mainstream influence, due rather to Schumpeter than Mandel, in the support shown by the Reagan adminstration for two key industries: biotech and microprocessors. In both cases, agents of the American state tried very deliberately to prime the pump of a new growth cycle, which could be impelled, in their view, by investment in technological innovation.
For the case of biotech I refer you to the brilliant first chapter of Melinda Cooper's Life as Surplus. I am unaware of anyone else who has analyzed the pattern of investment in biotech so well.
a crucial reference I am unaware of, I will look for it
Where microprocessors are concerned, I imagine everyone remembers the massive state investments into microelectronics by way of the US Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), as well as the knock-on effects that these investments had for the successive period of private-sector investment and development. If that's not clear, look at Castell's chapter on "Welfare to Warfare State," in his book The Informational City (his best, in my view). The point of this whole preamble is to stress the close cooperation of both state and corporate planners in the unleashing of new growth waves. Nonetheless, you and I will agree that the third sector of civil society (however one calls it) is crucial to the whole process. Castells also agrees:
"Modes of development emerge from the interaction between scientific and technological discovery and the organizational integration of such discoveries in the processes of production and management... The transition between modes of development is not independent of the historical context; it relies heavily on the social matrix initially framing the transition, as well as on the social conflicts and interests that shape the transformation of that matrix. Therefore, the informational mode of development will emerge from the interaction between its technological and organizational components, and the historically determined process of the restructuring of capitalism."
"Historically determined" means that the transition from one cycle of growth to the next will be what all participating social forces make of it; and therefore, that none of them alone will have the decisive word. Carlota Perez has very similar concepts. I guess most everyone who has looked in detail at the way an epoch-defining infrastructure like the Internet has developed would be inclined to agree with some version or twist of this idea.
I would argue that there is something fundamentally new today, and I wonder if you agree with it. The thesis is the following: until today, civil society response would either be through social/political movements that needed political power to push through policies, or through alternative economic arrangements which were 'dwarfish forms' (as Marx argued) that could not fundamentally compete with the efficiencies of capitalism. I would argue that today, there is an inversion, millions of people are involved first of all in a great transformation of the mode of production and the relations of production, which though they often (most often) are subsumed under the capitalist economy, are actually hyper-productive and more efficient than capitalism. Hence what is happening now is not just counter-movement, but the actual construction of post-capitalist modes of production. Hence, the p2p-f strategies are designed to move from proto-mode mode of production, to full alternate mode of production, in which the surplus value stays in the social economy, and thus can be the basis, as it was for the 19th cy labour movement, for the creation of a global commons-based social and political movement. It is this movement which may potentially mount a systemic challenge.
I see two issues that need to be covered. I share Brian's view of the possibility of a new kondratieff wave, which I called some years ago, the 'the high road to p2p' (high, because, even though it is capitalist, it would be more smoothly creating p2p infrastructures in a context of growth and redistribution, rather than low: bottom-up survivalist p2p in the context of global dislocation); such a high road, I argued then, would necessarily incorporate both green and p2p/distributed elements;
Your idea of a "high road" to global growth, containing both green and p2p elements, is spot on, and you really do it honor with your current work, by the way. Again, this idea is widely shared: witness Jeremy Rifkin, who does advise a large number of European governments. However, green policy is not the same as green ideology. The same holds for everything concerning the cooperative economy, and I would imagine that your current work in Ecuador leads to the need for a sharp distinction between lip-service to the commons, and the creation of really usable commons. We can't just be utopian; we also have to be critical. The next growth cycle will happen, in one way or another. But it will not necessarily take the high road.
I am still unsure that it will happen, but am sure that there will be a parallel development of a surging counter-economy. The key is to work either the convergence of the existing social economies, with commons-based peer production, or to create a new wave of commons-producing social economies. Are you familiar with the work of Pat Conaty, Robin Murray, John Restakis and others, remarkable students of the history of the past social economies, and convinced, through dialogue with p2p-f, of the need for this convergence ?
In fact, I quite agree with the following:
however, it is important that such k-wave growth would require at the same time deep structural reforms, of the kind undertaken by roosevelt in the 30s and by european post-war govt's after WWII (and now we would need this type of reconfiguration: http://p2pfoundation.net/Russia_and_the_Next_Long_Wave)
Yet, we see nothing on this sort. This could mean that the scenario would be that following the 1873 meltdown, not a consistent growth, but a long series of enduring crisis, ultmately leading to world war and the russian revolution; but the difference is, there are now much more serious problems to deal with: energy and resource crisis, climate change, soil depletion and so much more grave social crisis.
What this would mean is that, all the potential for growth that we see (smart cities, internet of things, etc ..) may actually not be able to be used by capitalism for a growth wave.
But it is also here that I diverge somewhat, concerning your interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I don't think that period resembles the present doldrums. I think it resembles the neoliberal period from which we are now exiting.
what you say here below is new to me, and perhaps suggests I have a wrong interpretation of Carlota perez' work, but here is how I see it, or saw it; a high growh period until 73, at which time the mid-term crisis of the K-wave occurs ; at that time, the chip gets invented while the fordist system enters in crisis; financialization occurs because the system cannot really yet adapt to the new, which is the basis not for the declining k-wave, with low-growth in the western world, but for the new k-wave expected after the meltdown of 2008. Do you also distinguish the post-80 globalization as a phase of internetworking of capital, but crucially, I don't think capital has yet understood the huge potential for social business design that is the result of the second wave of massive civic networking. In other words, capital has not yet really incorporated the potential of p2p for the next growth wave. Crowdfunding, social lending, distributed energy, all these things will be the potential basis of the future k-wave. Capitalist globalization was the response to private centrally controlled networks, p2p and its economies is the expression of the 2nd wave of global civic networks.
The thing is that after the long stagnation of 1873-1896, there was tremendous growth in the United States in the period from 1897 to 1929 -- just as there was tremendous growth in both the US and East Asia from the '80s to 2008. To understand the situation of the world economy today, you have to grasp the characteristics and limits of the growth cycle that did occur in the early twentieth century, and see the parallel to the the growth cycle that really did unfold from 1980 to 2008. (I say "really did" because some Marxists, following Robert Brenner, deny it altogether, as though global cities, the cabling of thw world, the rise of East Asia, etc, were just a detail).
any figures on the growth rate of the US, I thought it was pretty similar to the average of 2% per year in europe since the 1980s ?
After the "Great Depression" of 1873-96 (that's exactly what they called it at the time), the new upswing began with the unprecedented merger wave of 1898 to 1902, which institutionalized the vertically integrated, multidivisional corporation. That was somethig new under the sun. I'm talking about US Steel, General Electric, General Mills, Nabisco, and dozens of similar giant corporations, many of which are still around today. Typically their names include the idea of "national" or "general," which signifies the step upward in scale from the regional enterprises that preceded them, and which they absorbed. At the core of this whole development you find a very nasty corporation, Du Pont, along with its stepchild, General Motors, and its emblematic manager, Alfred P. Sloan. They forged the real archetype of the giant corporation. These corporations developed tremendously during the naughts and teens, and then again after WWI. The growth wave happened; and global hegemony was already shifting to the US. But the social order could not absorb the shocks of this development. It could not soften the brutal exploitation of labor and redistribute profits for social reproduction. It could not control the tremendous ecological damage unleashed by oil-powered machinery (in the US, the major ecological issues were water pollution, erosion and flooding, and the dust bowls created by mechanized agriculture). Finally, the institutions of exchange -- the gold standard and high finance -- could not stand the stress brought by America's rise and Britain's decline. This was the triple crisis of labor, land and money in the 1920s and 30s, as described by Karl Polanyi. It was a consequence of erratic, unbalanced capitalist growth, and therefore, as you say, of a long series of unending crises.
We know that the period of chaos was followed by one of rationalization and integration in the postwar period. The name of that period is Fordism, because Ford, despite or maybe because of all his managerial violence and crude racism, had a social philosophy. I'm not going to get into the philosophy of Fordism which is developed ad nauseum by whoever you care to read. I'm nauseated because I also know the history of neo-imperialism and of the so-called "Third World" at this time. Let's just say that the recurrent crises of the period between 1897 and 1945 were resolved, temporarily, and at tremendous costs, through the creation of a form of stable growth that sowed the seeds for the kinds of breakdowns that we are experiencing today.
Now, here comes the point at which it may be difficult to follow my argument. I want to contend that the period of 1980 to 2008 has _already_ been a long period of both growth and unending crises, comparable in that sense to the early 20th century. These periods are comparable because they both saw the irruption of tremendous and destabilizing productive forces (as destabilizing as the steam engine itself was in its day). The Internet was something new under the sun, and so was the networked firm. Remember those incredible years of the late 1990's, when corporations like Enron and WorldCom burst on the scene? Again there was a tremendous upward scaling, to reach global level; and of course, not all the contenders survived. But today we can see the ones that did: thus the talk about the "new managerialism" of the Bay Area elites. Their modus operandi, as you know, is still the Schumpeterian dogma of disruptive innovation. They are still preaching chaos.
Indeed, no one has been willing to see the neoliberal era as in any way similar to the Fordist period that preceded it, especially in terms of stability. No one has called those neoliberal years "the Sunday of life," as the Hegelian philosopher Kojeve described the boom years of the 50s and 60s (which, for Kojeve, marked "the end of history"). Instead, the neoliberal period from 1980 to 2008 has seen continuous social, ecological and monetary crises, which, since the financial crisis and Fukushima, have become very difficult to ignore. Even the hard capitalist right in the US does not ignore them: it very actively denies them. The untenability of the present world order is an open secret. In fact, it's a bleeding wound.
I believe that governments and ruling elites in the rest of the world (and even to some extent within the US itself) take the present crisis very seriously indeed, and realize that the creation of a new pattern of development and of governance is now urgent. Not because the productive forces are lacking, but because they cannot find a sustainable "fit" with the current social order. And yet it is not so simple to invent a new one. All the more because the inventor of the last apparently stable order, the US under Roosevelt, is now in the long and protracted process of losing its hegemony, while the rising powers of East Asia, especially China, are not very well positioned to assert their new strengths. In the early 20th century the US had a continent-sized territory for a relatively small population, and it was unmatched in its hemisphere; whereas the Chinese are embroiled in the dense tangle of rivalries left by WWII and the Cold War. So, even though the essential features of this crisis are relatively easy to see, the supposedly happy outcome corresponding to the norm of 1945-73 (if one really believes that was a happy outcome) is not so easy to see. Instead, it's frankly invisible.
By the way, I have written at length on the theory of all this, in both English and Spanish:
http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/crisis_theory.pdf
http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/tres_crisis.pdf
So my question to you Brian is: what makes you so sure that this wave of growth is indeed coming ?
Well, if the outcome of a grand crisis truly is historically determined, then we cannot exactly know what is coming; because we ourselves still have to make it happen. Here I would like to point out how unlikely the Fordist expansion of the 50s and 60s looked in the 1930s, or again, how unlikely the network-driven globalization surge seemed in the 1970s and even the 1980s. It's a bitch for an intellectual not to know what is coming, but that's the way it is. I am not at all sure that we will see a growth wave with the characteristics of the postwar period, inspired by the Rooseveltian New Deal. I think that period is wrongly taken as a norm to which society must inevitably return. However, let's face it, the Chinese governing elites are incredibly good students of history, and their every move since 2008 proves this -- whether it's huge state investments in transportation infrastructure, or cornering the markets in wind and solar power, or expanding cooperative relations with other countries, or experimenting with the consequences of popular democracy in Wukan, or investing in the smart power grids touted by Rifkin. They are engaging in major rounds of infrastructural investment, as the US did in the 1930s and the postwar period, in the attempt to stabilize capital accumulation and adjust it to meet society's needs. So we can't just look at the West anymore. We also have to look at what is going on in the East.
completely agree with your assessmnt in China .. I have often argued that despite the perversions and exagerrations in China (64 m empty appts. in their ghost cities), the elite still governs the country with a rationale of its longer existence and some version of the public good in mind; by contrast, the US governing structure can't almost not make 'right' decisions anymore, because private interests outweigh the longer term interests of the system (at least for now); European elites are similarly on a destructive path
Now, I am not a Chinese booster, far from it, I have spent enough time there to see how painful life in China can be. But the actions of the Chinese communist elites really make it look as though they spent some time reading Arrighi and Wallerstein on the characteristics of a successful hegemony. Both of these authors (and let's throw in another neo-Gramscian, Robert Cox) stress the way that a would-be hegemon must offer positive advantages to its potential rivals, so that they aspire to emulate rather than reject the new dominant power. China is doing this all over the world, following to some extent (but in its own more forceful and imperious way) the pattern of networked cooperation set earlier by Japan. Of course the offer of cooperation is being taken up by many countries. Germany, in particular, has every interest in emulating and partnering with its biggest customer -- because German growth since 2008 has been predicated on Chinese demand for both sophisticated industrial technology and high-end consumer durables. China's effort since the mid-2000s was already to extend its infrastructural development from the coast to the interior, that was the "Go West" phase. Now, with its Eurasian development corridors and its African and Latin American economic policies, it is trying that on a global scale. And it's doing so for better and for worse: just as the US expansion after WWII was for better and for worse, despite all the enthusiasm that people around the world had for Roosevelt and the Americans in 1945. We are likely to see at least the lineaments of a new China-centric world order, before we all perish from climate change.
this is very visible in Ecuador, which is now very dependent on its alignment with China and its extravist and financial support policies
But anyway, Michel, you have lived in Asia, presumably you have a lot to say about this. I am not naive about China and I think there is quite a good chance that its policies will fail utterly, by foundering on the internal contradictions between savage capitalism and an overdeveloped control apparatus. My point here is merely that if a new growth wave depends in part on the relation between technological development and state policy, and if that is well known by almost everyone, then the least we can do as intellectuals is to observe how certain larger powers are drawing conclusions from those well-known postulates. We are not alone with our theorizing of Kondratiev waves.
the big problem I see in East Asia is the resource and material crisis, there is simply not enough for long-term growth on the current materialist basis. Hence, the potential for huge social rage in this region .. see the perennial sub-civil war in thailand where I live for example, where worker wages have been stagnant for many years ..
Further: I do think some kind of investment wave and capitalist growth will happen in the 2020s, beginning perhaps very soon (well, I actually think it has already begun). I think it will also happen in the West, despite everything. However, it may not eventuate in any virtuous spiral with positive effects on social relations. It may be very ugly indeed. I share your worries, believe me. Look at the huge, suicidal investment in shale gas and tar sands oil in North America, and the plans currently afoot to use this deadly energy source as the key factor for the reindustrialization of the continent. Look at Mexican industrial and cognitive-sector growth in the devastating context of the narco-wars. These are terrible signs, not just harbingers but actualities. All the political intelligence of the western hemisphere can at present be found in a few South American countries, and they don't have the power to change things on a geopolitical level. The picture is not rosy, far from it. I hope all of the above lends a little clarity to my brief remarks in the previous post.
good point, I may have naively associated a new k-wave with a renewed social contract. I have this hypothesis that the opposition to the system often saves the system. I believe the potential victory of Syriza in Greece may set off a rejection of austerity throughout Europe, and start a latin american scenario, where since the naughties, pro-social policies have become the norm. In the longer run, I think we need, and thus propose, a re-alignment of progressive forces around the idea of the commons, first through the creation of local alliances and chambers of the commons which produce social charters to reconstitute support to political movements; and second through national and European global coalitions of pro-commons parties (digital, natural, industrial, social-entrepreneurial), which have objectively sociological and demographic majorities (they just don't know it yet)
The second issue is: do you see Brian, the broad restructuring that is also taken place from the bottom up ? Yes, indeed, most of the p2p economy is indeed subsumed to capitalism, but, there is a huge wave of bottom up innovation, mobilisation and re-invention, on the scale of the labor movement in the latter half of the 19th cy. If you see it (I do, as I document it every day), how is this impacting your assessment of capitalist strategies. I would question any analysis that is exclusively focused on the internal dynamics of the capital class, and neglects the counter-movements and counter-restructurings that are taking place.
Yes, of course I do see it, this is the impressive thing going on in the world! And it has been going on for quite a while. The thing to realize and to act on is that these counter-dynamics are continuous since the crisis of the Fordist political economy and the beginning of neoliberal restructuring in the 1970s. At that time, a very broad and deep assessment of the dead-ends of capitalist development was shared around the planet, and it went far beyond the legacies of Marx, even though the Marxist inheritance was crucial to the new thinking. I was born in California in '59 and I can attest that counter-cultural ideas and practices have unfolded continuously since the 60s around the world, in rather astonishing ways at differernt periods, not the least of which was the late 90s/early 2000s. However, only now, under the destructuring power of the current crisis, are large numbers of people able to see the stakes of global development as clearly as they did back in the late 60s and early 70s. Yet I think that in certain respects -- and however counter-intuitive this may seem -- we are a good deal more empowered now than dissenting sectors were back then.
I agree, but the key for me is access to distributed means of production
True, those generations stopped the war in Vietnam and dealt a huge blow to the hegemonic capitalist power by unseating Nixon and ushering in a whole series of social and ecological reforms. But they also launched the complex of ideas and practices which you have been documenting through the p2p foundation, and those usages shaped the social matrix from which the Internet developed, changing the social game decisively. People say the net was created by Darpa. That's superficial and ignorant. The net, as a global infrastructure and social institution, was created in exactly the way that Castells describes, with crucial inputs from the state, the corporations, and civil society. Especially the latter. In the foundational architecture of the TCP/IP stack, and in the subsequent development of GNU/Linux, one can see the imprint of a powerfuly egalitarian ethos, oriented toward use values. In fact, that development vindicates in many ways the vision of the great dissenting American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, in his forgotten little book The Engineers and the Price System (1921), which had already sparked a social movement in the 1930s.
Veblen understood the core value of the engineers to be cooperation in the development and use of technological systems; and he contrasted that cooperative ethos to the price system of "business enterprise" which, in his view, was all about sabotaging industrial cooperation so as to create monopolies, maintain scarcities, and impose higher prices. Business enterprise cuts productivity to exact higher prices. On the basis of that key insight, which he derived from the sharp recession that followed WWI, Veblen attempted with some success to start a social movement of engineers, in protest against the forms of development that were being imposed by the giant monopoly corporations. Veblen's real inheritance, however, came much later, in the dissenting sociology of people like C. Wright Mills, who inspired the entire New Left, notably people at UC Berkeley. That was the kind of place where, in the 70s and early 80s, the egalitarian potentials of the TCP/IP stack were developed into social practices.
Everyone should be aware of the crucial features of TCP/IP, which distinguished it from the X.25 protocol that several European states as well as Japan were working on in the 1970s. X.25 was designed to make the national telcos into gateway providers of informational services, which they would control, meter and price. TCP/IP - that sinister creation of Darpa - was designed to encode and decode whatever message you want, period. No meter, no control, no price. For the early Internet engineers and the top scientists who got first access to the fledgling net, this was elegant, useful, commendable -- just good common sense for smart and privileged people. For the marginalized grad students and counter-cultural hippie types at places like Berkeley, this was a chance to turn idealistic potentials into social realities. The point was to create a communications machine that would be the polar opposite of the three coporate-state TV channels, ABC, NBC and CBS - the Pepsi, Coke and Dr. Pepper of the Fordist mass media. The Internet that we still know today resulted from a complex and contradictory evolution where emancipatory inputs had tremendous relevance. And that kind of process has continued up to this day, from Napster to Global Revolution TV in 2011.
Of course I know what has happened in parallel to all that, from Google to NSA. I have analyzed and critiqued the counter offensives of the corporate states, step by step. But I have also participated, step by step, in the unfolding of the emancipatory potentials of the information society, which moved far beyond the US and have largely left that country behind (I am sad to say, since I now live there once again). The important thing to see is that growth waves do have positive sides to them. What was so impressive, in the 90s, was the manner in which a vast, truly global constellation of egalitarian and ecological movements took hold of the emancipatory potentials that were thrown off by the wave of growth that shot through the world system after the Fall of the Wall, and before the state-corporate elites got started on their ill-conceived attempt at imposing a "return to order." I think that going forward, we should really respect all the components of a historically determined process such as the one we are living through. What has typically been lacking, among the sectors oriented toward p2p and the commons, is a real understanding of how important state institutions and industrial development still is. If we want to influence the responses to the crisis, we have to be aware of these things and actively deal with them.
I agree with your last assessment in particular, and this is why I think anarcho-capitalism is such a pernicious ideological influence, as is the 'absolutist horizontalism' that is so pervasive. In my mind , they explain partly the relative defeats of the occupy and 15m movements. Our efforts in Ecuador are very much about reconstituting industrial development around p2p dynamics and transforming the state, though the social basis and political will for pushing them through is lacking at present.
Just for info, if Brian has not seen it, the Commons Transition Plan we have crafted here in Ecuador, http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan, with the ToC at bottom.
Michel, I was not aware of this. I am moved. This is a tremendous plan. I have followed to some small degree what is going on in Ecuador, notably because I had often crossed paths with Carlos Prieto del Campo some years ago in Spain. But this is fabulous! It is really beautiful, inspiring and encouraging to witness an attempt at turning those vast molecular revolutions into tangible institutional policy. I get what you mean when you talk about contributory comons, the reformed corporations of a solidary economy, and a partner state. Some positive dynamic between those three major social formations is needed to change anything.
really really glad we converge on this
Though the actual effect of this plan will be limited in Ecuador, it is significant that it has been commissioned, and that a global commons-oriented movement of movements is emerging from which it is derived and which is looking at it. Lots of the proposals I made a few years ago (the commons-based reciprocity license, the alliance and chamber of the commons, the global coalition of the commons), are now being taking seriously and the subject of actual experimentation on the ground, along with the thousands of other p2p/sharing/commons experimentations and projects (I'm not talkng about the business sharing economy here). Nearly every aspect of the bottom-up p2p economy (from urban gardening to co-working to rural hackerspaces) is growing exponentially, along with its capitalist similes .. (this is factually documented, I'm not just saying this, though of course, it is easier for emergent phenomena to grow exponentially).
Of course it is not only documented, it is visible to anyone with eyes to see. If Jeremy Rifkin can leave the Wharton School of Business to go talk about p2p and decentralized energy grids with EU bureaucrats and German ministers, then something is happening. All the more when similar ideas start to take root in China. The great effort now, across the the three major social formations but especially within civil society, is to make the new technologies viable for social and ecological reproduction.
yes, do you have any ideas and references on the latter. It is at the core of some of our proposals here in ecuador, in our policy papers on open agriculture and open industry
Generally speaking, when you get outside the Anglo-American orbit, the limitations of the price system become clearer. How exactly do you offer hundreds of millions of impoverished people access to culture, energy, development and productivity by way of a monopoly system? Impossible. And even more, how do you offer people in the formerly developed world those same things, at a time when the monopoly system has "progressed" to such a point that even those people are superfluous? It's impossible. Apple and co. are not going to bring progress to the masses. The cooperative economy offers an answer that the capitalist system cannot offer. And yet most of our social institutions are still tragically incapable of even registering either the impossibility of the current social deal, or the proposed reformulation of our productive relations.
agreed, which is why the answer must first come from the grassroots
So my second question is: how do the new social movements affect capitalist scenarios ?
Well, I am afraid we can see it, no? The capitalist scenarios remain firmly fixed in North America, where they are exacerbated to the point of madness. In Europe, which has partially collapsed, a green-washing p2p rhetoric is applied on top of mounting inequalities, while Germany reconfigures itself to become the continental hegemon and attempt a new partnership with China. Meanwhile China itself, the largest and most productive country on earth, is fixated on a development path that oscillates wildly between excarbated entrepreneurialism and intensified state control. In other words, the rising global hegemon is prey to centripetal and centrifugal forces that constantly threaten to rip it apart, were it not for some fairly amazing efforts to ride the tiger, wherever it may choose to go.
I see the UK and dutch governments as 'right=wing' p2p governments in the sense they use the participatory potential as a weapon to undermine the welfare state (while the spanish govt is consciously anti-p2p and fighting it). I see syriza and perhaps other players as potential canditates for partial 'partner state' experiments
The terrible thing is that today, new social movements lend fuel to reactionary forces. In China, 8% growth per annum is considered the minimum necessary to stave off an impending social revolution by the have-nots of the urban peripheries and the vast interior. In Turkey and Brazil it's substantially the same, in Egypt the revolution has already happened. with the results we have before our eyes. My guess is that the peace can't hold much longer in India either. And I have not even mentioned Boko Haram, or the bombs that just wnt off in Urumqi, etc. The dynamic of action and reaction is systemic. Social movements are tremendously powerful, except when you compare them to their dialectical other, the forces of social control. The same dynamic governs cognitive capitalism, in its antagonistic relation to the forces of commons-based peer production.
agreed
In the deadlock of this global conflict we are definitely looking at triumph of the powers of chaos, comparable in that sense to those that expressed themselves after 1914, when the long breakup of British hegemony began. The sun that finally set on the British Empire is now setting on the American one. And what happens in the twilight hour? That's the question of the present. History would lead us to predict vast wars. I am not so sure that will happen. Again, everyone has had plenty of time to reflect on World Wars I and II. No such conflagration followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. Instead we are hit with climate change and recurrent financial crises. A generalized, low-intensity civil war seems to be the predominant form of violence in our time, rather than cataclysmic wars between nation-states and empires.
My hypothesis is: the next k-wave may well not be coming, and with a perfect storm of really grave issues risking to coalesce say by 2030, we may need an integrated alternative, much faster than we expect.
I agree with you, Michel. Well, not entirely: I do think there will be some kind of new growth wave, but I don't think it will correspond to any Rooseveltian norm -- and I don't think we should wait for that to happen, as though only a capitalist god could save us now. The worst thing would be to trust in the new growth wave (or ripple) when it finally comes. Anything short of political-economic autonomy is an illusion. And the latter can only be gained by galvanizing and extending the great accumulation of counter-systemic thinking that has been built up across the twentieth century and on into the present.
I think this is what the p2p-f is working on, i.e. cultivating, catalysing and internetworking seeds of the new in the chaos
The Saint-Simonian belief that we have to catch the ays repeats. That's exactly why the critical utopia of the Multitudes journal broke up: some people like Yann Moulier Boutang believed that the contradictions of cognitive capitalism would be overcome in a new growth wave; while others -- like myself and all the Italian emigres -- foresaw that nothing so fortunate was going to happen, and that there would be no "New New Deal." Maybe the postman doesn't always knock twice. Kondratiev waves are like waves on the beach: they always come, but they are not always what you expect.
I had a dear friend who was killed in the '80s by a wave on the beach in California, the result of an unexpected tsunami in Asia. What else is new? Fukushima was already your perfect storm: the wave that destroyed any promise that capitalist growth waves can somehow save us. We don't need a new expansion of the death machines. We need a revolution. It's not going to come from some desperate gesture that sparks the fires of reaction. It can only come from the urgent propagation of a critical utopia, in the face of a gathering disaster. You're right, we have to go much faster. And at the same time, we have to hold much closer to the truth of what is really happening in the world. If everyone shares our most basic ideas, than we had better insist on the specific differences. And we had better make those differences into real social practices.
thanks for all your work in exactly that direction, Brian
yes, we have to boldly see the upcoming train wreck, and you help us with that, and, having lost all hope, we must nevertheless build the alternative, and the social movements that will be needed to defend and expand it, until the moment of victory and the phase transition, Michel
# 2 Background on the FLOK Project <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#
Background_on_the_FLOK_Project>
# 3 The Framing of the Proposal <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ Framing_of_the_Proposal>
* 3.1 The Three Value Models and the transition to a Social Knowledge Economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Three_ Value_Models_and_the_transition_to_a_Social_Knowledge_Economy>
o 3.1.1 The first model: 'Classic' Cognitive Capitalism based on IP extraction <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_first_ model:_.27Classic.27_Cognitive_Capitalism_based_on_IP_extraction> o 3.1.2 The second model: Netarchical Capitalism based on the control of networked platforms <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ second_model:_Netarchical_Capitalism_based_on_the_ control_of_networked_platforms>
+ 3.1.2.1 The Value Crisis under conditions of netarchical capitalism <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Value_ Crisis_under_conditions_of_netarchical_capitalism> o 3.1.3 Towards a third model: a mature 'civic' peer-to-peer economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Towards_a_ third_model:_a_mature_.27civic.27_peer-to-peer_economy>
+ 3.1.3.1 Solving the value crisis through a social knowledge economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Solving_ the_value_crisis_through_a_social_knowledge_economy> * 3.2 Four Technology Regimes <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Four_Technology_Regimes>
o 3.2.1 Netarchical Capitalism as a technological regime: peer to
peer front end, hierarchical back-end <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#
Netarchical_Capitalism_as_a_technological_regime:_peer_to_ peer_front_end.2C_hierarchical_back-end>
o 3.2.2 Distributed Capitalism as a technological regime: the commodification of everything <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#
Distributed_Capitalism_as_a_technological_regime:_the_ commodification_of_everything>
o 3.2.3 Resilience Community Platforms Designed for Re-Localization <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Resilience_Community_
Platforms_Designed_for_Re-Localization>
o 3.2.4 The Global Commons Scenario as the desired alternative <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_
Global_Commons_Scenario_as_the_desired_alternative>
* 3.3 Cognitive/Netarchical Capitalism vs. an Open-Commons based Knowledge Society <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Cognitive. 2FNetarchical_Capitalism_vs._an_Open-Commons_based_Knowledge_Society>
o 3.3.1 The Socio-Economic Implications of a Social Knowledge Economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Socio- Economic_Implications_of_a_Social_Knowledge_Economy> o 3.3.2 Discussion: IP and patents impede and slow down innovation <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Discussion:_IP_and_patents_impede_and_slow_down_innovation>
+ 3.3.2.1 Intellectual property rights and their supposed role in cognitive capitalism <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Intellectual_property_rights_and_their_supposed_role_in_ cognitive_capitalism> + 3.3.2.2 A synopsis of empirical evidence on the effect of
exclusive intellectual property regimes on innovation and productivity <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_synopsis_of_empirical_
evidence_on_the_effect_of_exclusive_intellectual_property_regimes_on_ innovation_and_productivity>
o 3.3.3 Discussion: the role of Indigenous Peoples and (Neo)Traditional Knowledge <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Discussion:_the_role_of_
Indigenous_Peoples_and_.28Neo.29Traditional_Knowledge>
+ 3.3.3.1 Arguments for the specific role of (neo)-traditional
knowledge and peoples in a social knowledge transition <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Arguments_
for_the_specific_role_of_.28neo.29-traditional_knowledge_and_peoples_in_a_ social_knowledge_transition>
+ 3.3.3.2 The potential role of commons-based reciprocity
licenses to protect traditional knowledge <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_
potential_role_of_commons-based_reciprocity_licenses_to_ protect_traditional_knowledge>
o 3.3.4 Discussion: Gender Aspects <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#
Discussion:_Gender_Aspects>
* 3.4 Introducing the new configuration between State, Civil Society and the Market <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Introducing_the_new_ configuration_between_State.2C_Civil_Society_and_the_Market>
o 3.4.1 What can we learn from the already existing social knowledge economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#What_can_ we_learn_from_the_already_existing_social_knowledge_economy> o 3.4.2 The new configuration <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_new_configuration> o 3.4.3 Why is this a post-capitalist scenario? <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Why_is_ this_a_post-capitalist_scenario.3F> o 3.4.4 Discussion: The role of the capitalist sector <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Discussion:_The_role_of_the_capitalist_sector> * 3.5 A description of the new triarchy of the Partner State, the
Ethical Economy and a Commons-based Civil Society <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_
description_of_the_new_triarchy_of_the_Partner_State. 2C_the_Ethical_Economy_and_a_Commons-based_Civil_Society>
o 3.5.1 The concept of the partner state and the commonification of public services <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_
concept_of_the_partner_state_and_the_commonification_of_public_services>
o 3.5.2 The Ethical Economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Ethical_Economy>
+ 3.5.2.1 Discussion: Material and Immaterial Infrastructural
Requirements for the Ethical Economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#
Discussion:_Material_and_Immaterial_Infrastructural_ Requirements_for_the_Ethical_Economy>
o 3.5.3 The Commons-Based Civil Society <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_
Commons-Based_Civil_Society>
* 3.6 Beyond the market, beyond planning ? <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Beyond_ the_market.2C_beyond_planning_.3F>
o 3.6.1 The key role of Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_key_ role_of_Commons-Based_Reciprocity_Licenses> o 3.6.2 Mutual coordination mechanisms in the new 'ethical'
enterpreneurial coalitions: Cybersin redux ? <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Mutual_
coordination_mechanisms_in_the_new_.27ethical.27_ enterpreneurial_coalitions:_Cybersin_redux_.3F>
* 3.7 The historical and present importance of mutualization in times of increasing resource scarcity <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ historical_and_present_importance_of_mutualization_in_times_of_increasing_ resource_scarcity>
o 3.7.1 Discussion: The issue of eco-system sustainability <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Discussion:_The_issue_of_eco-system_sustainability>
+ 3.7.1.1 Why innovation should be located in open design communities <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Why_ innovation_should_be_located_in_open_design_communities> + 3.7.1.2 The role of 'idle-sourcing' and the sharing economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_role_ of_.27idle-sourcing.27_and_the_sharing_economy> * 3.8 A historical opportunity: The Convergence of Material/Technical
P2P Infrastructures, Digital/Immaterial Commons, and Commons-Oriented Governance and Ownership Models <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_
historical_opportunity:_The_Convergence_of_Material.2FTechnical_P2P_ Infrastructures.2C_Digital.2FImmaterial_Commons.2C_and_ Commons-Oriented_Governance_and_Ownership_Models>
* 3.9 Elements of Idealized and Integrative Full Transition Plan to a mature Social Knowledge Economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Elements_ of_Idealized_and_Integrative_Full_Transition_Plan_to_a_ mature_Social_Knowledge_Economy>
o 3.9.1 Analysis <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Analysis> + 3.9.1.1 1. Under conditions of proprietary (industrial) capitalism <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#1._Under_ conditions_of_proprietary_.28industrial.29_capitalism> + 3.9.1.2 2. Under conditions of emerging peer production
under the domination of financial and 'cognitive', 'netarchical' capitalism <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#2._Under_
conditions_of_emerging_peer_production_under_the_ domination_of_financial_and_.27cognitive.27.2C_. 27netarchical.27_capitalism>
+ 3.9.1.3 3. Under conditions of strong peer production under civic dominance <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#3._Under_
conditions_of_strong_peer_production_under_civic_dominance>
o 3.9.2 Transition Dynamic <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Transition_Dynamic> + 3.9.2.1 The State <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_State> + 3.9.2.2 The Ethical Economy <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Ethical_Economy_2> + 3.9.2.3 The Commons Sector <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Commons_Sector> * 3.10 Political reconstruction of social movements in a conjuncture of post-industrial transformation <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Political_
reconstruction_of_social_movements_in_a_conjuncture_of_ post-industrial_transformation>
-- *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 <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/