[P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy

Tue Dec 30 07:18:36 CET 2014

Dear Brian,

it's a great honour to have your considered response here, I may later
respond in a flowing text, but I will start by reacting inline to some of
your comments and critique, which I take in an entirely constructive manner.

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com
> wrote:

> *Orsan wrote:
>
>  global political economy theory started with Cox, and p2p theory would
>> benefit from a fruitful exchange. Potentially a p2p update on the
>> understanding of the 'transnationalization of production', which as
>> process overlaps with the informatization of economy, networkisation of
>> societies, and neoliberal globalisation offensive, or vice versa; a
>> global political economy upgrade for p2p theory, in my opinion is
>> necessary.
>>
>
> I totally agree, and that's the thrust of a response I just wrote on
> Nettime to the book by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis (I'll paste that
> response below). One of Cox's followers, Stephen Gill, showed long ago that
> neoliberalism has from the outset been a fundamentally trilateral hegemony
> (US-Western Europe-Japan). Now that all three poles of the hegemony are
> arguably in decline, it would be useful to analyze the weak points where an
> amplified and generalized p2p strategy could begin changing the common
> sense of citizenship, business and government, and of dissent and
> revolution too. I don't do that here - far from it - but the strong
> proposals at the end of the Future Scenarios book did seem to call out for
> exactly that kind of analysis, which would ground them in reality without
> invalidating them by any means. So I hope my critiques of the book do
> appear as constructive, because they were intended that way. - best, BH
>
> * * *
>
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Network_Society_and_Future_
> Scenarios_for_a_Collaborative_Economy
>
> Thanks for this book, Michel and Vasilis. "Future Scenarios for a
> Collaborative Economy" is exceedingly timely and I would recommend it to
> anyone interested in the Commons specifically, or in political economy
> more generally. In response, I've written something in between a review
> and a letter to the authors. I address Michel because he posted it.
> Hopefully he will respond to a few of my comments!
>
> I like the book, Michel, but I must also say, I'm somewhat mystified by
> it. I like the very sophisticated strategy that it sets out at the end
> for a possible transition to a society of commons-based production. I'm
> mystified by the rather simplistic presentation of contemporary
> capitalism at the beginning. What explains the gap?
>

First of all, I would like to explain a few caveats. This book explicitely
says at the beginning it doesn't want to be yet another critique of
capitalism. There are two reasons for this, first that I am probably not up
to that task. I am far from being the classic intellectual who would have
the time to keep up with all that necessary reading; I am more of a digital
curator , playing a role as a networker and catalyst, from a certain and
very specific angle: that of someone who believes that the core condition
for change is structural first, i.e. a focus on  the new mode of production
that is emerging, and that is mostly embedded in the present political
economy, but also starts to show early sings of an 'organic system', i.e.
that it can eventually find the way to self-reproduce itself, and to create
an accumulation of the commons, to replace the system of accumulation of
capital. What interests us, me and Vasilis, are the specific parts of
capitalism that 'react' to this emergence, i.e. the systemic logic of
cognitive capitalism (living off rents) that is now in part morphing to
netarchical capitalism, i.e. forms of capitalism which are entirely geared,
not to destroy the emergent commons, but to subsume it and profit from it.
So I see it that way, there are many scholars, who have studied in depth
the current evolution of capitalism in its complexity, but they are missing
an evolution of major import if they ignore the emergence of peer
production, which I feel they do. If you know of any, let me know, but I
haven't seen them yet. We have plenty of "social-democratic" or
"social-liberal" approaches (Benkler, Tapscott, Rifkin), but I have not
seen any thinker of the left. Yes , Michael Hardt and Toni Negri speak
about the common, but it is a very 'metaphysical' approach, that is not
concretely linked to the actual emergence of peer production and its
institutions.

On the other hand, we are more closer observers of the emergence of the
commons, and that part of capitalism that reacts and adapts to it. Thus, as
Orsan suggests, p2p theory does need an upgrade, but it may not be us that
are able to carry out such a necessary integration. But the book hope at
leasts to jumpstart that process, which is why I really rejoice in your
critique. I hope that it may wake up more classic thinkers of the left to
take the challenge of peer production into account.

> In Part I you adopt the theoretical framework of "long waves of
> capitalist development" as put forth by Kondratiev and Schumpeter, and
> more recently, by Freeman and Perez (Trotsky and Mandel aren't
> mentioned). In its most general form, the long-wave idea is that
> capitalist society periodically goes through major depressions, during
> which investment is withdrawn from production. Meanwhile inventions
> accumulate until such time as conditions look good, and a massive wave
> of technological investment lays the foundations for a new growth cycle.
> Right now we're in such a depression. Therefore you try to analyze the
> possible futures of the current "techno-economic paradigm."
>
> There is some ambiguity here, but that's OK. On the one hand the book
> follows Carlota Perez, explaining that the information technology
> paradigm has run up against a set of internal contradictions and that a
> mature phase of sustained growth can only come under new political and
> institutional arrangements. On the other hand it hints in certain places
> at the emergence, in the upcoming years or decades, of an entirely new
> paradigm (which, according to Schumpeter or Freeman, implies a distinct
> set of technologies and organizational forms). And then near the end it
> quite strongly claims, with Marx, that capitalism must now be overcome
> in favor of a different system. The upshot seems to be that the new
> society will emerge from the old, perhaps not entirely smoothly, but not
> through an apocalyptic rupture either. That's realistic and desirable,
> in my view.
>

I agree with that assessment, but I think the situation is complicated by
very real ecological and structural challenges. In my reading, the
emergence of peer production is too fresh to be able to affirm that we are
'right now' in a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation. So we had
the 'sudden systemic crisis' of 2008, and the Depression that followed it,
but nowhere near enough of the political and institutional changes that
would be necessary to launch a new successful kondratieff wave. So the wave
will come (though probably after another 'aftershock'), it will incorporate
'green' and 'p2p-commons' aspects subsumed in a new capitalist compact, but
it will be weak and messy as it will lack a new 'social compact'. On the
plus side, it also gives the counterforces time. The aim for me is that, by
the time the next mid-term Kondratieff wave hits, the counter-economy of
the commons will have sufficient force to have achieved at least 'parity'.
It is only once parity is achieved, that a true phase transition process
will be on the agenda.  So the priorities right now, are to develop those
type of practices of governance and property, and those types of politics
and policy with the social movements aligned with it. What is to be done
right now is nothing less than a grand reconstruction of emancipatory
politics, aligned around the structural changes brought about by both
'subsumed' and 'organic' forms of peer production. This is why our
proposals are dual, on the one hand our proposals for 'open cooperativism',
i.e. a set of interventions to create an organic counter-economy; and on
the other hand, the 'Commons Transition Plan', a set of proposals to renew
the transformative politics and policies of emancipatory social forces.

>
> I too think some kind of new growth wave is almost inevitable, within a
> decade or so - and though it will probably not be on anywhere near so
> intensive as the postwar growth wave that so many theorists take as a
> norm, it could well be more extensive, reaching far more people on our
> densely populated planet. I also think such a new long wave does imply
> distinctly new technologies capable of attracting new investment; but in
> the absence of radical breakthroughs, the big difference is most likely
> to be in the political and institutional structures that govern those
> technologies. In other words, the current technology set is more likely
> to be augmented and institutionally inflected (as early mass
> manufacturing was by postwar Keynesian Fordism) than it is to be
> radically transformed (as Keynesian Fordism was radiclly transformed by
> the IT revolution). In other words, we are likely to get an extension
> and amplification of the certain aspects of the current paradigm, but
> under new institutional arrangements.
>
> The problem is, Michel, you never really discuss the current
> techno-economic paradigm in any serious way. What you and your co-author
> are talking about, in Parts I and II, is a small though important field
> of activity, the one that can be identified with keywords such as P2P,
> social media, crowd-sourcing, sharing economy, etc. The best parts of
> the book contain significant insight into these activities, as one would
> expect. However, by claiming to discuss the future of the entire
> capitalist system and then not really doing so, you blur the issue and
> diminish the potential value of your work.
>

I have explained why we have done so above, both by choice and because of
our real limitations. Nevertheless, we are unapologetic in the sense that
though emergent, this is really in our opinion, the key to the
transformation of our economies and societies. Yes, there is plenty going
on, but the key lever today, that is our thesis, is the emergence of peer
production, of the commoners and peer producers, and of netarchical
capital. Living in age, I see the move to middle class realities, I see the
popular mobilization to share more of the proceeds, and this is important,
but it is not crucial. What is crucial is the change in the mode of
production.

>
> One can follow Manuel Castells and call the current techno-economic
> paradigm "Informationalism" - or better, "Neoliberal Informationalism,"
> to give some idea of how this mode of production is governed. But
> Informationalism does not mean that the only significant commodity on
> the contemporary market is information. Nor does it signal an eclipse of
> industry, as you suggest in chapter 1.

I don't think we are suggesting this anywhere in chapter 1, so this is
either in my view a misinterpretation, or a lack of proper explanation on
our part. What we call for is in fact a new type of industrialization, ie.
open, distributed and solidary forms of production, where 'what is heavy is
local and what is light is global'. In fact, we don't believe at all that "
the only significant commodity on the contemporary market is information";
we believe that information is being de-commodified.We believe that in the
new emergence commons-driven economy, market activities develop around this
decommodified core, either in capitalist formats, as in the current free
software economy, or as we propose and is starting to happen, in
post-capitalist forms (market and non-market). We don't believe that at
this stage, these organic counter-forms of peer production can be dominant,
but we believe they can be significantly build and strengthened, and form
the basis of a new politics, just as the cooperative movement formed the
basis of emergent labour in the 19th century.

> Instead, Neoliberal
> Informationalism has been based on a "lead technology" which is new kind
> of producer goods, namely IT in all its facets (computers, software,
> cables, mobile telephony, communications satellites, etc). These goods
> in combination with networked organizational forms are used to create
> transnational supply chains, constituting what is generally called
> "just-in-time production" or "the global factory." The characteristic
> companies of neoliberal informationalism are not Facebook and Google, as
> one would gather from your book, nor even less, recent start-ups like
> AirBnB or Uber. They are giant networked firms like WalMart and Apple,
> which have their products manufactured in China, coordinate their work
> forces and supply chains through sophisticated IT systems, and sell
> their wares on the web as well as in the store. Or they are specialized
> corporations like Cisco, Verizon and IBM, which furnish the hardware and
> software for the new mode of production, distribution and sales. All
> these corporations have evolved under the anti-welfare policy mix of
> neoliberalism, and with the resources allocated by speculative finance,
> which has largely replaced the central planning of national governments.
> Not coincidentally, finance itself is crucially enabled by IT.
> Computers, cable and satellite networks, transnationalism and financial
> governance are key aspects of the current techno-economic paradigm.
>

I agree that this is the case, at the same time, I would strongly argue
that the rapidly accelerating ecological, climate and resource crisis will
severely weaken this paradigm. These transnational supply chains are
extremely unsustainable and so it becomes a necessity for progressive
politics for focus on smart re-industrialisation and re-localisation of
production. The triple internets of knowledge resources, energy and
manufacturing give a potential basis for a entire new vision of production
and industrialization. The de-industrialization that neoliberalism wrought
in the West is no fatality, and a very fragile construct in ecological
terms. We can't know if we succeed, but we can't afford not to try, as the
alternative is a chaotic desintegration of the world system.

> Now, it's necessary to add that older sectors, such as petroleum, steel,
> chemicals, automobiles, engineering, grain production, etc, remain
> tremendously significant for the global economy. They are not just going
> to disappear in the next ten or twenty years. However, the way these
> sectors are articulated, both internally and between each other, has
> effectively been transformed by IT, and that's why we can speak of
> Neoliberal Informationalism as a distinct techno-economic paradigm. As
> you and Vasilis point out, this paradigm has been predicated on low-wage
> precarious labor, and it has called on finance to furnish the means of
> consumption through the extension of credit to individuals. The debt
> burden of the working and middle classes has risen tremendously and now,
> in the overdeveloped world at least, these classes can no longer consume
> enough to prop up economic growth. So the system is in a deep crisis,
> one which cannot be resolved by simply pumping money into asset markets
> as various governments have been doing. That crisis is further
> intensified by geopolitical factors (rise of Asia) and by climate change
> (which has been made a lot worse by the rise of Asia). How will the
> global political economy reconfigure itself under these circumstances?
> And what can civil society do to influence the next redeployment of
> capital? That's what we need to know.
>

Agreed, and we believe our proposals are part of this mix of what is
needed, albeit not the whole story, as you correctly suggest, but it will
be a crucial part of that new story.

>
> In Part II, it's really interesting how you present a diagrammatic field
> of four distinct yet neighboring scenarios, divided on the one hand
> between distributed and centralized organization (or local and global
> scales), and on the other hand, between capitalist and commons-based
> development paths (or "for profit" and "for benefit" activities, as you
> also say). However, for the reasons already stated, the capitalist or
> for-profit side of the diagram is not very convincing. In chapters 4 and
> 5 we are introduced to two supposedly emergent categories. First, a
> corporate-scale "netarchical capitalism" where sharing and cooperative
> production are enabled by interfaces with closed, privately controlled
> backends that facilitate the harvesting of monetary value from social
> interaction. And second, an individual-scale "distributed capitalism"
> where everyone is asked to become a networked entrepreneur of him- or
> herself, creating their own backends for profit. Now, without a doubt
> these are already both realities. The first has already undergone
> significant expansion, partially wiping out the old media sphere with
> some inroads on the hobby, transport, in-person service and vacation
> sectors. The second has all the reality of neoliberal ideology: it is
> the computerized version of the entrepreneurial ideal, where everyone
> freely competes in an open, unregulated economic realm. But the claim
> that these figures represent the capitalism of tomorrow could only hold
> true if "we are not talking about monopoly capitalism" - which is a
> crucial caveat that you supply early on.
>

But Brian, the fact that capitalism has other more complex realities, does
not at all invalidate that these are important emegent realities. The
exponential growth of netarchical capitalism is a fact, not conjecture; and
the very rapid growth of precarious cognitive workers is also a fact (along
with other facts such as service workers growth and the growth of
industrial working classes in the Global South). In the Netherlands, the
so-called independent zzp workers (estimated to count for half of
precarious workers only), and reaching 25% of the workforce if I'm not
mistaken, are the most rapidly pauperising sector of the economy. Again
what we are saying is that these are crucial trends, because they are the
ones that are aligned with the tranformation towards commons driven
developments. Netarchical capital is based on the direct exploitation of
human cooperation, and networked structures, and attendant commons, are
absolutely crucial for the survival and self-organisation of precarious
knowledge workers. The existence of complex other forms of capitalism does
absolutely not invalidate that.

>
> The problem is that we are talking about exactly that, Michel, just look
> around you. The great oligopolies that corral major sectors of the world
> economy, fixing prices and blocking the entry of smaller actors, are
> alive and despicably well in every major economic sector, including IT;
> and they are supported by very solid forces of the national and
> transnational state. To suggest that monopoly capitalism is on the way
> out through some force of networked nature is just plain mystifying, and
> that's the principal argument I have with this book.
>

But we are nowhere suggesting that. In fact, netarchical capitalism is a
new form of monopoly capitalism; and distributed capitalist networks are
rapidly monopolizing as well. Already bitcoin mining is in the hands of one
dominant player and the ownership of the coins is more concentrated than
that of sovereign money! This is true for all distributed sectors, such as
social lending, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, etc ...

The reason we stress this, is historical, since it is precisely a shift
within the managerial classes, towards new systems of production that it
could subsume, that prepared the ground for later phase transitions. It is
the Roman emperors and landed gentry that moved from slavery to the
'coloni' system, and it is forces within feudalism that financed the growth
of the capitalist sector.  But the new feudal and capitalist sectors that
were first subsumed and served the maintenance and survival of the old
system, at the same time created new social forces and contradictions that
prepared the ground for more fundamental change. So that is our argument,
that the emergence of netarchical and distributed capitalism show a shift
from the managerial classes towards the new modality of value creation and
distribution. Given the understanding that this is precisely how the two
other phase transitions that we now occured, rather than just deplore and
critique this, our suggestion is to learn from it. This means: how can
commoners and peer producers render the seeds of the new system into a
'organic' system that can reproduce it. This is therefore the meaning of
the two other quadrants, they represent the organic alternatives to that
netarchical capture. What we are doing is not denying the old class
struggle between capital and labor, which continues to exist and operate,
but to say that a new type of class struggle is emerging, that between
commoners and netarchical capital. And we are saying, and of course you
could dispute this, that this new type of contradictions is the most
pregnant for social change, because it has in itself the seedform of the
new. It is the alliance between the old and new emancipatory forces, which
is key for social change.

> Something else really is changing, though; and this is where the book's
> proposals, and more generally, those collected by the P2P Foundation
> over the last decade, are really worth one's attention. What's happening
> is an impoverishment of the former "First World," which is losing out to
> the newly developed countries at the same time as it starts being
> subjected to the environmental stresses of climate change. What one can
> see on the horizon is a gradual evening-out of global wages, leaving
> much of the former West in decaying housing with legacy appliances and
> amenities, while populations in the East and South rise up to a roughly
> similar level and then stagnate. That's already happening: and the
> frustration it engenders was behind the wave of protests in 2011-2013,
> whether in Egypt, Brazil, Russia and Turkey, or in Spain and the US. It
> is precisely the existence of the oligopolies and the financial elites
> (the famous 1%) that account for this dynamic. And we're likely to see
> even more intense frustration and anger as these populations have to
> confront the difficulties of climate change. Under these conditions,
> both newly unemployed people and those who have gained or retained a
> precarious hold on middle-class status are likely to find great
> attraction in what the book calls "resilient communities" and "global
> commons." Additionally, intellectuals with a capacity to see the
> dead-end future, whatever their class, will start to look for serious
> alternatives.
>

We agree here. At the same time, I would not consider the system as static.
The fundamental problem for the European population is that the 'surplus
value' is no longer available for positive social contracts. But this is no
law of nature, just as the Latin American left showed that a revival of the
progressive state was possible (and achieved tremendous social progress in
just ten years, with every percent of GDP growth leading to four times more
poverty reduction than in Asia); just so a renewed progressive left could
set in motion, with a renewed vision of the partner state,
re-industrialization policies that would relocate part of the surplus ,
available for social investments.

> The discussion becomes tremendously interesting when the "for benefit"
> categories are discussed, in their local and global forms. This is the
> Marxian part of the book, where a change of the system itself starts to
> look desirable. Both the for-benefit categories are based on the
> generative matrix of the Commons, and I love the clarity with which
> you've expressed its basic principles: "It could be said that every
> Commons scheme basically has four interlinked components: a resource
> (material and/or immaterial; replenishable and/or depletable); the
> community which shares it (the users, administrators, producers and/or
> providers); the use value created through the social reproduction or
> preservation of these common goods; and the rules and the participatory
> property regimes that govern people's access to it."
>
> At this point (Part III), the strict focus on information production is
> abandoned and what comes to the fore are the new possibilities presented
> by the maker revolution: not only 3-D printing, but all the
> computer-controlled tools which can use freely circulated open-source
> designs to create practical objects ranging from housing to automobiles.
> One can easily see the relevance of such productive capacities for
> impoverished communities, especially when they are beset by the stresses
> of changing climates, violent storms and soon, rising water levels.
> What's more, to take a page from Jeremy Rifkin's recent books, it
> becomes clear that with falling costs for solar and wind generation,
> energy production itself could potentially be decentralized and managed
> according to commons principles so as to build resilient communities.
> The combination of alternative energy sources with micro-manufacturing
> techniques represents a possible basis for a new form of economic growth
> that could cater to very large numbers of people despite, or rather
> because of, their inability to reach Fordist and Neoliberal levels of
> grotesque hyperconsumption. If the development of capitalist production
> during the next upswing could be influenced so as to furnish the
> infrastructure and toolkits of decentralized energy production and
> micro-manufacturing, then the next wave of growth could have many
> positive consequences. That's the paradigm shift that we need, and Part
> III makes that quite clear, bravo. The question is, how to make it
> happen? What are the "new institutional arrangements" that we need, and
> how to achieve them?

Part of the answer can be found in another ebook we are publishing, that
contains detailed proposals for a Commons Transition Plan, see
commonstransitions.org . Guy James (Staniforth) in cc can provide you with
copies on request. The transition plan is not complete, since it only
focuses on 'social knowledge' (but does incorporate a stress on its
material conditions), and we intend to work on this, with a focus on the
material commons later on. Pat Conaty and Mike Lewis have already done
brilliant work on transitioning towards material commons infrastructures,
and we hope to achieve a convergence and integration of these approaches
later on.

The site commonstransition.org, is intended as a global platform to trash
out precisely such commons transition experiences, practices and proposals.

> Or as you and Vasilis write:
>
> "Arguably, the issue is not to produce and consume less per se, but to
> develop new models of production which will work on a higher level than
> capitalist models. We consider it difficult to challenge the dominant
> system if we lack a working plan to transcend it. A post-capitalist
> world is bound to entail more than a mere reversal to pre-industrial
> times. As the TEPS theory informs us [ie, the theory of techno-economic
> paradigm shifts], the adaptation of current institutions and the
> creation of new ones take place in the deployment phase of each TEP. We
> claim that the times are, finally, mature enough to introduce a radical
> political agenda with brand new institutions, fueled by the spirit of
> the Commons and aiming to provide a viable global alternative to the
> capitalist paradigm beyond degrowth or antiglobalization rhetorics."
>
> Now, that's not Carlota Perez talking anymore. That's a utopian Marxist
> strain that has affinities with Italian Autonomia, to the extent it
> believes that progressive use-values slumber within the technologies of
> capitalist exchange, and that these use-values can be liberated through
> the kinds of self-organization that the Internet facilitates. The
> question is, how to avoid making this a purely utopian thinking, as
> Autonomia has proven to be so far? How can commons-based peer production
> reach deeply into daily life? And how can it expand globally, both as a
> philosophy and as a set of informational tools that can take full
> advantage of the new decentralized energy and manufacturing toolkits?
> Or, to put it in strategic terms: How can civil-society actors find the
> opportunity, in the current depression and in the upswing that will
> almost inevitably follow it, to push corporate production into supplying
> the toolkits for a society that will finally escape the worst and most
> life-threatening consequences of the capitalist system?
>

The key thing here is to understand this is not utopian at all (in my view,
Autonomia focuses too much on resistance and struggle, and not enough on
construction/creation) , but that millions of human beings are doing
precisely that. The key becomes to learn from each other, to put the pieces
of the puzzle together. Things like open value accounting, open supply
chains, commons-oriented crowdfunding, etc .. ALREADY EXISTS. The issue is
rather, how to scale, how to create social and political movements that can
support, expand and sustain it.

> In chapter 8, I feel that you are groping for a way to bridge the gap
> between two rather different things. First, the many specific
> micro-examples of (mainly informational) commons-based production that
> you do provide, in welcome detail. Second, a full-fledged economic
> praxis that could rival with the existing forms of Neoliberal
> Informationalism, which you (and the rest of us) can only imagine
> somewhat fuzzily. The way you approach this problem suggests that you do
> recognize the difficulties of overcoming the norms imposed by monopoly
> capitalism: after all, they are exemplified by the trajectory of Free
> and Open-Source Software, which has still not been broadly adopted even
> though the operating systems are now perfectly serviceable and perfectly
> free. You cite two very promising projects from what could become the
> next techno-economic paradigm, namely the Rep-Rap 3-D printer project
> and the Wikispeed automobile project, both of which are impressive and
> point the way toward a new articulation of social production. But it's
> clear that without support from either large social movements, or
> powerful economic actors, or more likely both, a new wave of capitalist
> growth will render these projects insignificant - or at least, no more
> significant than Free Software is currently. Traditional monopoly
> capital will put the breaks on Wikispeed. The coming wave of investment
> and development has to be bent to fit collaborative priorities.
> Otherwise, a no-future scenario looms.
>

Here is a potential key: we already have a thriving nonprofit, cooperative,
social and solidarity economy; and they have capital; we have growing
sectors of ethical finance etc ... And we have rapidly growing open
approaches, but that are subsumed by capital  (such as the shared knowledge
economy responsible for 1/6th of US GDP). The key is to create a
convergence between the already existing ethical economies, and the open
economies.

As you can see here, this has been one of the three strategic priorities of
our work at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net/What_the_P2P_Foundation_Did_in_2014

>
> It is in this context that you introduce the "Partner State Approach":
> "The PSA could be considered a cluster of policies and ideas whose
> fundamental mission is to empower  direct social-value creation, and to
> focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the
> promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory
> politics." This is absolutely true: commons-based production requires
> infrastructure investments that commoners themselves cannot provide, at
> least, not as individuals or a members of small and fractious voluntary
> networks. The implication (which I don't think is anywhere clearly
> stated in the book) is that we need collective investments in order to
> stimulate forms of growth that are very different from those seen under
> Neoliberal Informationalism. We need a government capable of shaping an
> environment in which Commons-friendly investments will be possible. Yet
> so far, not a single state has emerged as a reliable partner. I'm
> curious: How do you feel about this today, Michel (and Vasilis), after
> the difficulties that the FLOK project encountered in Ecuador, in the
> attempt to generate exactly such a Partner State Approach?
>

I think it is definitely premature to have any national government, to
fully take up such a transformational policy and to transform itself for
it. But that does not mean that no prefigurative actions can be taken.

In our customary annual review,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Top_Ten_P2P_Trends_of_2014

we point to two trends, one is what is happening at the local level:

i.e.

<*4. Cities and Countries of the Commons*

The highlight for the P2P Foundation in 2014, was the invitation by three
Ecuadorian institutions, i.e. the FLOKSociety.org project, to create
transition policies and proposals to create a social knowledge economy in
that country. It resulted in a Commons Transition Plan
<http://p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan>and more than 18 separate
legislative proposals. The transition plan is the first ever transition
plan to be focused around the commons, and historically important even
though the project itself seems stalled at the nation-state level
<http://p2pfoundation.net/FLOK_Society_Project#Evaluation_by_Michel_Bauwens>.
But more local pilot projects, like the plan for open agricultural
machinery in the poor district of Sigchos, under the leadership of mayor
Mario Andino, is progressing, with the help for example of Kate Swade of
Shared Assets.

But if nation-state transitions seems premature, there is a lot happening
at the city level.

A breakthrough is undoubtedly the framework, co-developed by Christian
Iaione <http://p2pfoundation.net/Christian_Iaione>, called the Bologna
Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons
<http://p2pfoundation.net/Bologna_Regulation_for_the_Care_and_Regeneration_of_Urban_Commons>,
which has reportedly been copied by 40 other Italian cities. Co-Mantua
<http://p2pfoundation.net/Co-Mantua> is one of the examples of such
projects. Italy is generally a very mature country for commons initiatives,
and Michel Briand, of the pioneering collaborative city of Brest in France,
has calculated there may be more than 100,000 urban commons projects in
France alone.

Of great interest as well are the innovative territorial strategies for
distributed fabrication such as the Barcelona Fab City project, see
theBarcelona
5.0 Plan <http://p2pfoundation.net/Barcelona_5.0_Plan>.

For more information about commons-oriented transitions, see
commonstransitions.org .

*Of utmost importance is of course also the experience in the Autonomy
Region Rojava <http://p2pfoundation.net/Autonomy_Region_Rojava>*, as an
impressive example of local and multicultural democracy, recently described
as a 'DIY Revolution' in Roar Magazine >

The second trend is the likely coming to power of Podemos and Syriza.
Whatever the difficulties they will face, whatever mistakes they will make
and sabotage they will face, they will shake things up. I believe there is
a significant opportunity there to create a dialogue and mutual learning,
between the traditional reformist and statist approaches, and the new
commons approaches.

One of the things I have been thinking, or rather 'dreaming' about, is the
creation of 'Commons Transitions Circles', i.e. pluralistic circles of
progressive commons-oriented activists, who would act to open the minds of
the more traditional statist left, towards the new potential opened up by
commons approaches.

OK, go to go for now, I'll try to the remainder separately

The problems that our civilization faces are vast. The extension of
> commons-based peer production from the software to manufacturing and
> energy production does suggest a path forward. But support for it, in
> the form of something like a Partner State, can only be generated from a
> far broader civil-society movement than we have today. Such a movement
> is being called into existence by the rising awareness that the current
> form of development is literally a dead end. One one hand, it is
> important to nurture this movement (and ourselves, as parts of it) with
> pragmatic principles of hope, of the kind provided by experiments with
> Commons-based peer production. On the other, it's necessary to cultivate
> a very lucid of what's actually happening in society, not to paint an
> apocalyptic picture but just to identify the really existing obstacles.
> That kind of analysis is often lacking on the postmodern left. You could
> have used a little more Trotsky and Mandel, imho.
>
> I think that civil-society movements have a tremendous amount to learn
> from experiments with peer production, and therefore, from the
> reflections in the last third of this book. However, I don't think any
> of this will go anywhere without a more realistic assessment of the
> forces currently in play. A broad movement needs to know both what to
> ask for and what to create, in view of pushing the really existing
> political-economic system towards a fundamental structural change. That
> means clearly facing the structure and power of corporate monopoly
> capital in its transnational form. I feel you have dispatched that issue
> too quickly and on that level, the book could definitely be improved.
> Actually, a careful read of this book has left me with the desire to
> rewrite parts of it, while keeping others intact - which I guess is a
> pretty good outcome for a book that reccomends the use of Peer
> Production Licenses!
>
> Let me close this long review/letter with one more quote from Bauwens
> and Kostakis, a particularly astute and admirable one:
>
> "According to Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) 'When the changes happen
> faster than expectations and/or institutions can adjust, the transition
> can be cataclysmic.' To avoid such a cataclysm, we arguably need
> political and social mobilization on the regional, national and
> transnational scale, with a political agenda that would transform our
> expectations, our economy, our infrastructures and our institutions in
> the vein of a Commons-oriented political economy."
>
> I could not agree more.
>
> best, Brian
>
> _______________________________________________
> NetworkedLabour mailing list
> NetworkedLabour at lists.contrast.org
> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
>

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at:
http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan

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/
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