[P2P-F] The Fabulous Future of p2p Economics, Commerce and Democracy

Fri Sep 19 22:02:34 CEST 2014

great and enthusiastic article indeed!

On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 2:22 PM, jules peck <jules at flourishingenterprise.org
> wrote:

> Hi all - I thought you may be interested in my latest blog.
>
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jules-peck/the-fabulous-future-of-p2_b_5836834.html
>
> I've just returned from an eye-opening, mind-expanding week in Leipzig at
> the 4th Annual global Degrowth congress. This vibrant gathering brought
> together over 3,000, mostly young, 'prosumer' activists and practitioners
> from a variety of new economy movements.
>
> While there I learnt a huge amount from makers, hacktivists,
> anarcho-syndical cooperativists, collaborative-commoners, anti-capitalists,
> free-culturalists, buen-vivir, transitioners, Fab-Lab-ers, p2p-ers and
> social-entrepreneurs from places as diverse as Spain, India, Bolivia and
> Brazil. And continuing the theme of new economics, on the train back I read
> Jeremy Rifkin's important new book the "The Zero Marginal Cost Society -
> the internet of things, the collaborative economy, and the eclipse of
> capitalism."
>
> In preparation for Degrowth I also spent three days in Meissen on a
> deep-dive with a small group of p2p and commons movement leaders including David
> Bollier <http://www.bollier.org/> andMichel Bauwens
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens> who, in the introduction to
> his book, both praise Rifkin as a visionary of a new world order.
>
> I was in Germany as part of the research and outreach for work on the Real
> Economy Lab
> <http://www.compassonline.org.uk/the-road-from-serfdom-to-the-equal-sharing-of-blessings/>,
> an initiative that aims to help connect theory and practice through a
> collaborative mind-mapping of the wider ecosystem of the post-growth new
> economy movement. The hope is that this process can form the start of a
> global alliance building to converge these various new economy movements
> into one force for good.
>
> Germany was a good place to start as its probably the country furthest
> ahead in the combination of the Internet of Things, renewable,
> decentralized and community controlled energy, grassroots commons activists
> and 'makers'.
>
> One thing everyone I met have in common is a desire to create a new world
> order, a new way of creating, connecting and being which is beyond the
> market, beyond ownership, growth and capitalism. To them the idea of
> working for a large company for a wage has just never even been on the
> radar. Indeed the idea of large, shareholder owned private enterprises
> doesn't feature in the world they are co-creating. Many of them have also
> conceptually, and in some cases, such as Cooperativa Integral Catalana
> <http://cooperativa.cat/en/>, literally moved beyond any real
> relationship with politics and the state. Indeed, even the cutting edge of
> politics, Citizen-democracy parties like Partido X and Podemos, are running
> fast just to try to keep up with the convergence of these movements.
>
> Emerging from this convergence is a powerful vision of a new world order
> and paradigm which represents real hope of building a bottom-up safety-net
> to catch the ever-more fragile top-down, as it unravels and collapses
> around us.
>
> The new paradigm these movements are creating is post-enlightenment,
> lateral not hierarchical, chaordic, networked, decentralist, inclusive,
> open, rebellious and fun. It represents a near future that will test and
> fail much of the incumbent and dying models of politics and business. And
> it cocks a snoot at the Lockean, Millian and Social-Darwinian paradigm and
> story that has so atomised, excluded and isolated us from each other and so
> ravaged the planet.
>
> What have till now been separate movements of the co-operative, commons
> <http://www.bollier.org/commons-resources/commons-projects>, p2p
> <http://p2pfoundation.net/>, Transition and Makers are converging and
> learning that they have much in common and that if they stand and develop
> together they can be more than a side-show and thorn-in-the-side of the
> mainstream -- they can become the mainstream in a new post capitalist, post
> growth world.
>
> Management guru Jeremy Rifkin's new book The Zero Marginal Cost Society
> <http://www.thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/> is, along with Naomi Klein's
> new "This Changes Everything - capitalism versus the climate
> <http://thischangeseverything.org/>," a current must read. It documents
> an on-going shift to what Rifkin calls the Third Industrial Revolution. And
> it summarizes much of what I experienced last week in Leipzig about the
> coming together of the Internet of Things (IoT), the p2p worlds, the
> collaborative-commons and new economy movements.
>
> Rifkin points to a central contradiction of capitalism which I find a
> useful addition to the new economy theories
> <http://flourishingenterprise.org/uncategorized/alternatives-to-capitalism> of
> people like Professors Schweickart, Olin-Wright and Alperovitz. This is
> that capitalism's inbuilt dynamism drives it necessarily, if left to a
> truly free market, towards near-zero marginal costs of production for
> additional production units -- what Rifkin calls 'extreme productivity'.
> The implications of this are revolutionary -- once at near-zero the
> system's inbuilt dynamics stall and start to unravel -- "goods an services
> become nearly free, the exchange of property on markets shuts down and the
> capitalist system dies".
>
> Thus the very DNA of capitalism, that which has made it such a success,
> has within it its own lethal sting in the tail. Its designed to kill
> itself. And to kill off any enterprise, such as the private shareholder
> owned corporate, reliant on its continuing. Capitalism has done its job and
> made itself redundant. If only we had made it to where we are now, on the
> edge of near-zero marginal costs, and the new economy it heralds, maybe 40
> years ago
> <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse>,
> we might not now be in our nose-dive into possibly unstoppable, runaway
> climate chaos.
>
> Rifkin's view is that we are seeing the eclipsing of capitalism as a
> system and that incumbent centralised and vertically integrated
> profit-orientated businesses, whilst they will try to mimic, learn from and
> slip-stream this new order, will at best be carried only a short way on
> this journey to the new economy. Certain sectors like energy, health,
> finance and consumer products are first in the firing line. Some nimble
> incumbents in other sectors may morph into new forms of enterprise that can
> flourish within the new order.
>
> The idea that we could soon all be able to 3D print our own homes, cars,
> clothes using open-access, open-source code, near-free energy and resources
> in local Fab Labs <https://www.fab10.org/en/home> is mind-blowing but a
> near reality. It blows the hierarchical, inequality based current economy
> out of the (3d printed) bathtub. If done with a close eye on ecological
> limits it could herald a true circular economy.
>
> I've long though the next paradigm will need to go beyond the tired state
> versus market, capitalism versus socialism debate and, as Rifkin says "the
> young collaborationists are borrowing the principles virtues of both the
> capitalists and the socialists, while eliminating the centralising nature
> of both the free market and the bureaucratic state". I'm not sure what Marx
> would have made of the idea of the shift from exchange-value to
> 'shared-value', nor where this sits vis a vis 'use value' but as Rifkin
> says "The rule book that governs a market exchange economy becomes far less
> relevant to the life of society" in what he sees as the soon-to-be
> dis-enclosure of the means of production and the eclipsing of capitalism by
> the collaborative commons.
>
> The vision of networked, open-source, open-access,
> exponentially-increasing extreme productivity in the hands of the masses,
> not private interests, is of course manna from heaven. I'm not entirely
> convinced by all of Rifkin's logic. His future seems a world covered in
> endless Pv farms and wind turbines and his thinking on decoupling seems
> untested and incommensurable with the reality of the scale and intensity of
> energy and carbon reductions needed to keep us from a 4 degree world. But
> there is much in here which rings true.
>
> Rifkin's thinking dovetails nicely with Klein's latest book which is also
> about the eclipsing of capitalism by people-power. Indeed Klein champions
> many of the movements I met in Leipzig and gave a keynote address to the
> congress.
>
> This p2p, people-powered revolution in commerce, economics and democracy
> is all emergent stuff. Whilst experimentation is flourishing and producing
> real impact, the social and movement networks are not yet fully connected
> into a coherent global alliance. And as yet they don't have an over-arching
> vision, narrative and route-map which can inform their various trajectories
> and combine to build a progressive anti Shock Doctrinaire
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine> alternative to the
> unravelling of our current systems.
>
> But after what I've seen and heard this week I'm ever more optimistic. I
> feel a bit like I've just been plugged into the Matrix - only its not
> malign and its in our control. I've seen the future and it's F
> <http://www.valldaura.net/greenfablab/>ab
> <http://www.valldaura.net/greenfablab/>-ulous.
>
> All the best
>
> Jules Peck
> Founding Member
> Jericho Chambers
> 12a Charterhouse Square
> London EC1M 6AX
>
> M: 00447920844802
> W: www.jerichochambers.com/
> T: @citizenjules
> B: www.citizenrenaissance.com
> '*Aspire not to have more but to be more*' Archbishop Oscar Romero
>
> Clerk to Jericho Chambers despo at jerichochambers.com on +44 77 64 78 89 69
>
> Jericho Chambers is the trading name of Jericho Chambers LLP, a limited
> liability partnership registered in England and Wales with partnership
> number OC385688 and whose registered office is at 35 Piccadilly, London,
> W1J 0LP
>
>
>
> --
> All the best
> Jules
> Convenor, Real Economy Lab
> <http://flourishingenterprise.org/real-economy-lab>
>
> e: jules at flourishingenterprise.org
> m: 07920844802
> w: www.flourishingenterprise.org
> b: www.citizenrenaissance.org
> t: @citizenjules
> 'Aspire not to have more but to be more' Archbishop Oscar Romero
>

-- 
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